At the beginning of this summer, I returned from a trip to Huawei headquarters in Shenzhen, where the next Huawei Presales Elite Camp took place.
This time, the hospitable Chinese introduced us to their server line. With the release of Intel Xeon V3 processors, it has undergone significant changes, which I want to tell you in this article




It's no secret that the update of server lines for most vendors is timed to release new generations of Intel processors. No exception, and Huawei, have released new solutions based on Intel Xeon V3. Below I propose to get acquainted with them and understand what they can offer us at the moment.
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RH Rack Servers

There are already quite a large number of reviews on the Huawei rack servers, so I will not dwell on them in detail. I will mention only a few facts that may be of interest to you. You can always find out more detailed specifications for all models in the official website of Huawei Enterprise .



The name of all rack models has the following form: RH **** (For example: RH 1288)

• R means Rack-mount.
• H means that servers are equipped with Intel processors. For if you turn the letter I to 90⁰, you will get the letter H. Here is such a mysterious eastern logic.
• The first digit corresponds to the height of the server in units.
• The second digit corresponds to the number of processor sockets.
• The last two digits correspond to the “level” of the model. By releasing a new model, Huawei collects feedback from the market. And if there is a big need, they can “adjust” the parameters of their servers up or down. So different gradations of the same model appear, differing by processors, the number of maximum supported memory and PCIe slots:
o 85 - the first version;
o 88 - “republished” version with older processors;
85A / 88A - “weakened” budget version;
o 85H / 88H - enhanced version (high-end).

However, having carefully studied the model range, one may notice a discrepancy: the RH5885 / RH5885H models have a height of 4U and 4 sockets. This is explained by the fact that the number 4 in Chinese culture is unhappy, since it is pronounced similar to the word "death." Therefore, the Chinese strongly avoid this number.
And this is noticeable not only in the IT sphere: the cost of apartments on the 4th floor in any house will be an order of magnitude less than any other floor.

With the advent of V3 models in the Huawei RH servers appeared:
• Intel Xeon V3 processors;
• DDR4 RAM;
• 16 Gbs FC I / O cards, 56 Gbs IB, FCoE and 10 Gbs copper (RJ-45) Ethernet;
• PCIe SSD card up to 1.6 Tb;
• what many have been waiting for - official SAS HBA support (LSI SAS2008) for connecting DAS and storage through SAS back-end;
• the ability to install up to 2 SATA DOM 32Gb.

In addition, it is worth noting the less significant improvements:
• Increase the maximum temperature threshold of the processors to 45⁰ ;
• iBMC has replaced iMana (remote management tool);
• The appearance of LCD Touch-Screen diagnosis Panel.



Perhaps, there is nothing more to say about rack solutions.

X-series high density solution

Huawei redesigned its high-density server line by adding the X6800 V3 model instead of the X6000 model. Thus, currently only 2 models are available:
1. X6800 - 4U, 8 nodes
2. X8000 - 44U, 80 nodes

I’ll dwell on the new X6800 solution.



There are 3 types of nodes available to the user:
1. XH628 V3 Storage Node - double node high disk capacity. It has a hot-swap basket that holds 12 * 3.5 "disks + 2 * 2.5" disks installed separately from the basket;
2. XH622 V3 HPC (also known as Application Acceleration) Node is a double node for HPC, allowing installation of 2 full-size dual-slot PCIe (for example NVIDIA GPU or Xeon-Phi). Reduced floating-point performance with 4 nodes with GPGPU - 12 TFLOPS ;
3. XH620 V3 Compute Node is a single high performance node. Due to the increased density of the layout, the solution from 8 nodes has 16 E5-2600 V3 processors and 128 DDR4 slots in 4U.

It is worth noting that only single-type configurations are now available. Those. configuration with mixed node type is not available.

This solution will be particularly interesting in projects to build an HPC cluster or public clouds.

E-Series Blade Solution

Well, not to mention the blade solution Huawei E9000.



Appearing on the market in 2012, it still does not lose its relevance.
The chassis itself remained unchanged. With the advent of a new generation of processors, the blades themselves were updated, acquiring Intel Xeon V3 processors.



There is support for 16G FC, 10GE copper, FCoE, 56G FDR IB and 40 GE switches. But the converged switch 10GE + 8G FC remains the most popular one.
In addition to current innovations, Huawei announced support for potential technologies: IB EDR and 100 GE.

For convenience of configuration, I will give here the correspondence matrix of switches and mezzanines.



In terms of the variety of blades used, this solution can close all potential cases:
1. CH121 V3 - a half-high-density 2-processor blade;
2. CH140 V3 - a half-double 2-processor blade of super-high density;
3. CH220 V3 - full-size I / O blade;
4. CH222 / CH226 V3 - full-size blade with increased storage capacity;
5. CH240 V2 / CH242 V3 - full-size computational 4-processor blade.

In the end, it is worth noting that, despite such a “respectable” age, this solution still remains competitive against the background of other vendors in its technical characteristics.

Fusioncube

And finally, I left a completely exotic and unknown solution.
Keeping up with the times, Huawei decided to keep up with their competitors and released their own hyper-convergent solution FusionCube.

As a hardware basis, X6800 or E9000 servers can be used. The virtualization environment is the Huawei FusionCompute own hypervisor (based on Xen). FusionStorage is used to virtualize disk capacity, and FusionManager is used as a management tool.

In the FusionCube X6800 configuration, scaling will occur at the chassis level, and in the FusionCube E9000 - at the blade level.

The success and relevance of this solution in our market is very ambiguous.