Product Reviews

When HP introduced its first blade server last year, the ProLiant BL e-Class proved to be a tough act to follow. It offered an innovative design that set new standards for specification, build quality and manageability. In fact, it impressed us so much it not only received a well-deserved Recommended award but also scooped the prestigious Enterprise award at the PC Pro 2002 Awards ceremony. Furthermore, while other blade-server vendors such as Dell and IBM dithered and dallied, HP pressed its advantage home by uniquely offering a second blade server aimed at the service provider and telco industries - the BH. Along with many other server products, the BH was discontinued in the great merger of 2002 as HP plumped for the ProLiant products. The latest BL p-Class on review continues where its predecessor left off and aims to deliver a host of unique features that primarily target service-provision applications.

The p-Class enclosure is a 6U-high cabinet with room for up to eight blades. This doesn't sound like a lot when compared with IBM's BladeCenter (see p177), but as you'll see the chassis does offer a number of significant advantages. Power is the biggest factor, as it uses a separate 3U chassis that supports up to four single-phase supplies, while a three-phase model supports six hot-plug supplies. There are no standard three-pin plugs, since the system uses Commando power sockets, and three bus bar designs are available for distributing power across a rack to multiple blade chassis. Not only does this arrangement deliver far superior power fault tolerance and redundancy, it also has sufficient power overheads to handle the next generations of Xeon processors.

The power chassis also has its own integrated management module that connects to that fitted to the blade chassis to provide full monitoring facilities. Whereas the BL e-Class uses a full-width interconnect slot at the rear for all network connections and remote administration, in the p-Class these duties are assigned to a pair of GbE interconnect modules fitted at each end of the chassis. Designed to amalgamate all blade network ports down to as little as a single Gigabit port, these work in tandem with up to four QuadT network modules that are fitted at the rear, each providing four 1000BaseT connections.

The BL20p server blades are even larger than those used by the BladeCenter, but each provides a totally self-contained server complete with cooling fans. The two 2.8GHz Xeon processors are located directly behind the fans and further back is a bank of four DIMM sockets that support up to 8GB of ECC Registered SDRAM. Storage options are superior to IBM, as each blade offers an integrated HP Smart Array 5i Ultra160 RAID controller that extends RAID-0 or -1 array support to the pair of 18GB Ultra320 drives fitted in hot-swap carriers at the front of each blade. Network possibilities are even greater, since each blade is endowed with four 10/100BaseTX adaptors, with one used as a direct link for HP's iLO (integrated lights out) remote-management feature. A small module with a serial port and 10/100BaseTX crossover module can be used for a direct connection to a PC for local blade access.

For general management and software deployment, HP provides the same bundle that impressed when we reviewed the BL e-Class. The Rapid Deployment Pack (RDP) comprises Altiris' eXpress Deployment Server plus a ProLiant integration module with customised scripts for installing the network OS, creating images and deploying them to other servers. During testing, we found this much easier to use than the IBM alternative, as special scripts and images are created during installation of the Altiris package which are used to swiftly deploy your chosen OS. After contact with a DHCP server, each virgin blade appears in the main RDP interface and you can deploy an OS simply by dragging the pre-prepared script onto selected blades. The Altiris client agent is also automatically installed, so the server may be accessed from the Deployment Server on completion. Plenty of help-desk functions are provided by the Deployment Server: you're able to select individual systems, reboot or shut them down, copy files, remotely execute tasks and run remote-control sessions. HP's Insight Manager 7 software offers secure web-based server management and monitoring facilities. A network overview shows all discovered devices and their current status so problems can be quickly identified. You can check on processor utilisation and areas such as system-board operating temperatures or cooling-fan status. This information may be linked to an alert log and used to send emails or call a pager.

Although the BL p-Class offers a comparatively low processing density, it scores heavily in many other areas - unbeatable build quality, superb specification and industrial-strength power options, to name but a few. Critical enterprise applications require mainframe-level fault-tolerance and HP certainly delivers on that count.