Opteron in the Cloud: New HP BL685c G7 / BL465c G7 Server Blades

Monopolism in any form is harmful for all subjects of economic activity. For some reason, it seemed logical to start with such a phrase from the textbook a small story about where the best new blade servers, the HP BL685c and BL465c , should be applied .

The fact is that, unlike most other HP blades and other major players, these models are based on AMD Opteron processors, and not on the usual Xeon'ah. Intel processors, no doubt, are good, but AMD also eats their bread for nothing. New processors of the company are especially good in server applications, computing clusters and supercomputer systems where, in fact, are most often found. “Opterons”, of course, for many reasons, are not as popular and common as Intel processors, but the more interesting are the products based on them and the more curious is their comparison with competitors. Finally, the fact that HP built its new blades on the basis of Opteron already gives a serious credibility to AMD and causes nothing but respect.

But let's go back to the blades themselves. In fact, quite a lot has been said and written about the processors, and the HP BL685c and BL465s were only shipped at the end of June, and they will go into actual operation just in the fall, after they finish, they will be run in. That's about who these servers are best for, we are today speculating.
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On the younger and older models put two or four eight-or twelve-core processor. Against this background, there is no need to paint the potential performance of the system - and so it is clear that each of the blades gives out serious power, but the full basket works as a thresher in general. The better to take all these resources?

The answer lies on the surface: the same as the previous HP blade systems, adjusted for the increased load and consolidation of computing power, that is, the virtualization of resources and work with capacious databases. Especially since the interconnect Virtual FlexFabric, as they say, allows. And as an amendment, the now popular clouds, public and private, will appear. In their favor says a lot of memory and a good supply of physical network interfaces.



From the practical moments, it is necessary to note that 16 “small” BL465c can be installed in one chassis, which significantly (twice) reduces the likelihood of a point of failure. Therefore, it is more practical to deploy the public cloud on the BL465c, and leave the older model for databases. “Although, if the cloud unfolds across the enterprise, then why not,” says the director of the information technology department at the Oversan-Mercury data center, Jacob Ravshanov. The main thing - using BL465c, consider the number of running virtual machines per VMware vSphere 4.1 cluster.

The combat running-in of new machines has not yet passed, therefore, it is rather difficult to judge the number of virtual parrots in real-world tasks. However, the fact that HP decided to use AMD Opteron processors in its servers suggests that they show themselves to be at least as good as their classmates. Therefore, there is an opinion that the Opterons in the blades will still show themselves, and BL465c / 685c is the first serious step in this direction.