Features of the Intel x86 Hi-End Server - HP Superdome X System

The Hewlett-Packard project, code-named "Dragonhawk," bore fruit in the form of entering the market with an analogue of Superdome 2 on Intel processors. At the same time, all the main features of Hi-End servers moved to the new system, and if we add to this functionality an advanced ecosystem of software and hardware capabilities of Intel processors, it turns out to be a very interesting solution that competes with such giants of the Hi-End server market as IBM Power, Fujitsu SPARC64, Oracle SPARC M6. HP engineers have even managed to “align” the new system with its closest rivals. Under the cut short conclusions of this comparison.
See h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA5-6142ENW&cc=us&lc=en

Superdome X is very similar in hardware to the HP c7000 chassis blade, which is not surprising. It can be assumed that in this case, HP engineers proceeded from the judgment that the simpler, the better and more reliable. After all, all the sores and shoals of blade systems from HP were corrected and taken into account in the p-Class Blades in the days of COMPAQ. Thus, relying on a reliable and proven blade HP platform kills two “birds” at once - building a new system relying on a turnkey solution for connecting network interconnects, power supplies, fans and cooling systems, chassis control, etc., as well as continuing development of blade system with-class.

So, if you look at Figure 1, you can see that the Superdome X is slightly higher than c7000 and has a height of 18U, has twice the power supply and 1.5 times the cooling fans. The number of interconnects remained unchanged, for the Superdome X inherited the I / O subsystem from the C7000 with its mezzanines and the spread of ports across switches. Switches can be installed 8 pieces and currently supports 1/10 / 40Gbps Ethernet and 8 / 16Gbps Fiber Channel. In the near future, it is planned to add Infiniband and FCoE, the absence of which is most likely due to HP policy, since these protocols have long been implemented in c7000.
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Up to 8 server blades are installed from the front of the Superdome X chassis, which are essentially not separate servers but processor modules that have two sockets for the Xeon E7 v2 processor, 48 memory slots and three mezzanine slots (1 x8, 2 x16 PCIe gen3) , two FlexLOM slots with 10Gbps Ethernet adapters installed. Each blade can be glued with each other into a single server, thus obtaining a server with four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen processors.

You can create any number of such aggregated servers (nPar), naturally not exceeding (so far) the resources of a single chassis. Each nPar is naturally electrically isolated from each other. The modules that allow this “gluing” are located behind the chassis (crossbar modules), and this process is managed via the Onboard Administrator’s built-in web server, which we know from the C7000 chassis, of course, the Onboard Administrator firmware for Superdome X is different from the firmware for the blade c7000 chassis.


Figure 1 SuperdomeX Appearance


Figure 2 Blade BL920s

Currently, only Linux in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions is supported as an operating system. You can use any hypervisor supported by these distributions as the engine for creating virtual machines (Xen, KVM, etc.). Support for VmWare is questionable.

Naturally, within the framework of these operating systems, functionality became available that was previously inherent only to corporate UNIX. So, for example, a server in the Superdome X survives if an I / O board fails.
h20324.www2.hp.com/SDP/Content/ContentDetails.aspx?ID=4376
or memory modules
h20324.www2.hp.com/SDP/Content/ContentDetails.aspx?ID=4407

The links above show small videos where these types of errors are reproduced on real hardware.

The Superdome X system is already available to order through the company MUK and at a cost shows itself from the best side relative to its competitors. So, for example, a project on Oracle implemented on the Superdome X turns out to be cheaper than its competitors because of a successful licensing policy for Intel processors.

Anyone interested in this system can watch the webinar recording from Hewlett-Packard at the link
www2.ibtalk.net/index.php?cmp=attendx_meeting&mt_number=41536450

Source: h30614.www3.hp.com/Discover/Events/Barcelona2014

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