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HP Launches Radically New Blade Architecture The newly introduced HP BladeSystem c-Class portfolio, touted as "adaptive infrastructure in a 17-inch box", is boasting some pretty impressive metrics, including the ability to drive down facility costs by 60 per cent and reduce the cost of acquiring and operating infrastructure by 50 per cent over a three-year period. A 'no compromises' approach to attacking the fundamental issues underlying many of today's IT challenges has resulted in some innovative technologies that are sure to reshape the blade landscape. HP c-Class BladeSystem Creates New Paradigm for IT Operations and Management by Jay Parkes Speaking to a packed house at Hewlett-Packard headquarters in Palo Alto, California on June 14, and watched by thousands of partners and customers around the world via live Webcast, executive VP Ann Livermore announced HP's new c-Class BladeSystem. HP claims that this extension to its Adaptive Infrastructure offering is based on a breakthrough architecture that will forever change the way IT environments are operated and managed. Based on HP's new "blade everything" approach to infrastructure design, this new BladeSystem will have a dramatic impact on four key pain points – cost, time, energy and change. According to IDC, organizations will spend three times more on operating and managing their IT environments than on the purchase cost of the technology itself. Although many have tried to reduce operations and management costs by reducing labour costs through means such as outsourcing, HP set about to address what they saw as the fundamental problem – that technology needs to be much more self-sufficient and require much less labour to manage and operate. Leveraging the best technologies from right across the company – from HP Integrity Non-Stop Servers to HP printers – HP engineers have come up with a totally new modular architecture to serve as the foundation for the modern datacentre. The new c-Class BladeSystem, HP's first offering delivered against this modular architecture, is being positioned as "adaptive infrastructure in a 17" box", and HP is touting some pretty impressive benefits, including:
HP claims that as many as 64 c-Class servers can be fully configured and deployed in about 15 minutes because time-consuming interactions between server, network and SAN administrators are no longer required. Built-in HP Insight Control Management software automates and replicates many of the tedious, repetitive tasks associated with server provisioning; and because HP Insight Manager is integrated with other management tools such as HP ProLiant Essentials, including Integrated Lights Out and HP Control Tower, administrators have a single point of control over servers, storage, networking, and power and cooling. Built-in virtualization capability facilitates the movement of servers between physical and virtual c-Class environments, making changes and growth much easier. "By bringing together our best tools for provisioning and recovery, software patching and updating, and migrating between virtual and physical environments, we have been able to kick administrator productivity up by a factor of 10," says Mark Potter, VP, BladeSystems at HP. 
HP BladeSystem c-7000 Enclosure
To make c-Class more self-sufficient and more manageable, HP designers were also tasked with making the product as simple to manage as HP's printers so that customers could fix problems as easily as they can fix a paper jam. This led to the design of a two-inch LCD display panel that is located on the front of each c-7000 enclosure, allowing administrators to diagnose and troubleshoot problems while standing right in front of the box.
"But you can't manage what you can't measure," exclaims HP's Potter; so engineers put thousands of instrumentation points inside the c-Class product to collect data 24x7 on performance, system health, software, power utilization, thermal conditions and the status of every component and every connection in the system. The 'nerve centre' for the new management system, the new HP Onboard Administrator software, makes all this status information available to administrators through the LCD display with just a few clicks of a button. Redundant Onboard Administrator modules, with LCD displays, can also be added to the back of the enclosure for more advanced administration functions.
2-inch LCD System Management Display
"Onboard Administrator delivers consumer simplicity applied to complex datacentre operations – an industry first for blades," claims Potter.
Power & CoolingOperating a high-density computing environment such as a datacentre, means worrying about power and cooling, especially with the rising cost of electricity and the 'hot spots' that have been known to affect server reliability. Tasked with the design goal of reducing power consumption by 30 per cent without compromising performance, the HP Cool Team set out to completely rethink how blades are powered and cooled. The result of that effort was a unique new technology called HP Thermal Logic that fully automates and integrates the process of monitoring, measuring, controlling and optimizing the consumption of power and the application of cooling throughout the c-Class system. For example, a power supply is most efficient in terms of electricity consumption and heat generation when it is operating at full load. Thermal Logic's Dynamic Power Saver will automatically turn individual power supplies within the enclosure off and on as required to meet power requirements, while keeping some running at full capacity and others switched off. By 'virtualizing' power, this on-the-fly approach to power management can save up to 30 per cent in power when the system is fully loaded, a significant savings for IT organizations spending millions of dollars every year on electricity. The other half of this usually troublesome coin is 'cooling'; but with the c-Class architecture, HP appears to have turned the density of blades into a cooling advantage. As with the power, HP's approach was to use the intelligence of Thermal Logic to virtualize and 'pool' the cooling so that it could be adapted to the changing needs of the enclosure on the fly. First, the enclosure has been designed to be air tight, so that all the air passing through the enclosure becomes part of the cooling solution. In addition, HP engineers have invented the new HP Active Cool Fan, a key component of the cooling and power management system. Each enclosure supports up to 10 such fans, which can operate at low speeds, move more air than similar traditional fans and use 70 per cent less power to cool the same number of servers. These fans also produce about half the noise of similar, traditional fans, broadening the number of places where they can be used and allowing more of them to be packed closer together. Through the Thermal Logic Dashboard, administrators can monitor all aspects of the power and cooling system, including air temperature in and out, heat levels, power used, power available at the component level, the system level and even at the entire rack level. With this level of information and control, IT organizations can even charge the costs for power/cooling back to individual user departments. "The result of all this innovation is a very scalable cooling architecture that gives you a more efficient thermal performance for any workload you may be running," says Potter. "For SMB organizations, c-Class provides a 'datacentre right out of the box' that automatically takes care of power and cooling right from the start." "Wire Once, Change on the Fly" Connectivity Continuing in the spirit of attacking the underlying causes for today's IT problems, the c-Class design team also wanted to address the reasons why it takes so long and so much planning and coordination with LAN and SAN administrators any time the physical connections to servers are changed or new servers are added to an IT environment. The result of this design focus was the new HP Virtual Connect, which virtualizes I/O so that servers, storage and networks can all be connected, managed and changed together. Based on server-edge virtualization, HP Virtual Connect, which is implemented as a single module and a single cable, presents a simple view of the BladeSystem to the Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks. Through the Virtual Connect module, network and SAN connections are available to as many as 64 servers within a single rack, and any virtual servers riding on top of them. An administrator need only define a server's I/O connection, and then, with a click of a button, deploy that connection or migrate it to another server bay instantly, all without disturbing the network or the SAN. This saves provisioning and maintenance time, improves administrator productivity and allows resources to be pooled for better resource sharing. For complete details on the new HP BladeSystem c-Class portfolio, visit Hewlett-Packard. "The HP BladeSystem c-Class portfolio leverages the best technologies across HP to fundamentally improve how our customers will buy, build, manage and use their computing resources," says Ann Livermore. "By implementing a simple, out-of-the-box design, c-Class customers can dramatically reduce their biggest IT cost drivers and lessen the barriers to change often found with today's racked, stacked and wired datacentres," she concludes. Our Blade Experts are Really Sharp! Compugen has already gained considerable knowledge and experience implementing blade server solutions for a number of customers across Canada as part of server consolidation and other IT initiatives. Click here to find out about the benefits these organizations have realized, and how Compugen can use blade products, including the new HP BladeSystem c-Class, to help you make significant changes to the way you operate and manage your IT infrastructure. Back | ||
