Hey, HP! It's A Blade Server, Not A Clown Car
Hewlett Packard announced its new blade setup today, and the ProLiant BL2X220c G5 is something of a breakthrough. HP has been able to put two servers into one blade, cutting energy consumption and shrinking the space needed down on the server farm.
The two servers are completely independent of each other, but share the same shell. That setup allows the BL2×220c G5 to offer 60 percent better performance per watt than similar configurations. As for HP’s 60 percent improvement claim: In “internal testing the BL2×220c achieves 1582.73 bops/watt compared to 958.86 bops/watt on a cluster of Dell PowerEdge 1955 servers.”
But even if you quibble over the energy savings claim it’s clear that HP’s new blades will save on space–another key data center cost.
Once you toss in virtualization things can get really interesting. For instance, one blade could have a Linux server, a Windows server and run Mac OS X via virtualization easily. That’s a lot of stuff for one blade.
So get ready to make your server room half as big, and put twice as many air conditioners in it.
The two servers are completely independent of each other, but share the same shell. That setup allows the BL2×220c G5 to offer 60 percent better performance per watt than similar configurations. As for HP’s 60 percent improvement claim: In “internal testing the BL2×220c achieves 1582.73 bops/watt compared to 958.86 bops/watt on a cluster of Dell PowerEdge 1955 servers.”
But even if you quibble over the energy savings claim it’s clear that HP’s new blades will save on space–another key data center cost.
Once you toss in virtualization things can get really interesting. For instance, one blade could have a Linux server, a Windows server and run Mac OS X via virtualization easily. That’s a lot of stuff for one blade.
So get ready to make your server room half as big, and put twice as many air conditioners in it.
