12 Blade Blade for HP BladeSystem

HP blades today account for more than half of global blade server sales. And the success of the HP BladeSystem c-Class released five years ago is largely due to the fact that HP built, as they say, a large ecosystem of blades. In addition to the “massive” dual-socket ProLiant BL460c server blades in the HP BladeSystem c-Class chassis, you can install four-blade blades and HP Integrity server blades based on Itanium processors, specialized blades for virtualization and high-performance computing, as well as a workstation executed in the form factor blades.

A few years ago, HP StorageWorks developed the HP StorageWorks SB40c six-blade blade for the HP BladeSystem c-Class, as well as the blade with an integrated LTO tape drive. Now, the company introduces the HP StorageWorks D2200sb Storage Blade disk blade, which, with the same dimensions as the SB40c (i.e., one half-height chassis compartment), holds up to twelve hot-swappable SAS 2.5 hard drives. Now it supports disks with a capacity of up to 600 GB, but 2.5-inch SAS 1 TB drives have already appeared. After the new drives go through the standard rigorous testing procedure, the maximum blade capacity will increase to 12 TB. The blade is equipped with an HP Smart Array P410i RAID Controller with 1 GB non-volatile cache memory supporting RAID 0, 1, 1 + 0, 5 and 6.

HP offers two options for using the new disk blade. At first, it serves to expand the disk subsystem of the blade server installed in the adjacent compartment of the chassis, and is connected to it via PCI Express. That is, it is used as a Direct Attached Storage (DAS) storage system.
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The second option provides the HP StorageWorks D2200sb as a network storage system iSCSI SAN, the resources of which can be used by all chassis blade servers and even other servers connected to the chassis via an Ethernet local network. For this option, the HP P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance Software (VSA) runs on the blade server to which a disk blade is directly connected via PCI Express to the VMware ESX virtual machine. Using VSA on HP StorageWorks D2200sb implements such advanced iSCSI SAN functions as building a cluster of disk blades for capacity scaling, Network RAID for increased fault tolerance, thin provisioning, snapshots, remote replication and cloning.