Comments on: New Cisco Blade Server: B440-M1

By: Kramer

Kramer — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 04:54:00 +0000

The 7500 is a 4-way system. It only has enough QPI’s for 4 sockets. So you give a win based on speculation that it is incapable of. The 6500 is the same socket as the 7500 but with QPI for a two socket system. Loser: IBM for depending on an expansion chassis. TIE: Dell & Cisco

Density: “Theoretically” is nice – but do you have enough power for that many chassis per rack?

Memory: Tie. Dell allows the use of cheaper UDIMM’s – The 16GB RDIMM’s require more thorough testing. 32 DIMM slots are 32 DIMM slots.

To Mike’s comment on management. It takes a week to unlearn all the bad habits.

By: Proteus

Proteus — Sat, 08 May 2010 06:15:30 +0000

I dunno Mike.
The "lego" is a passive, solid bridge, with no components. Its considerably LESS likely to fail than the Dell non-redundant backplane design..or any system board component for that matter. You can try to "spin" it as you like, but from an engineering perspective, its a simple solid connector.

Flexmem is a proprietary ASIC that Dell HAD to develop, since your model is starting with a more expensive 4S design, and only populating 2S, rather than the less expensive, flexible building block approach of HX5. Want more sockets? Attach two blades together. Want more memory? Add an extra blade. Dell has to START big, and use proprietary technology to "reduce down". Also, that design is going to incur a latency hit..we'll see how much when benchmarks release.

16Dimm cost is still exorbitant. Customers are far mroe likely to use 4 or 8GB. 8GB+Max5 blade is still far less than a blade full of 16GB.
Also note that on Nehalem-EX, you MUST have 8 DIMMS per CPU to get max memory performance. Anything less cuts bandwidth down dramatically. Why? Because you have 2 memory controllers per socket, and 4 channels per controller.

By: Kevin Houston

Kevin Houston — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:40:49 +0000

Great points vs my opinions on #cisco 's new blade, B440-M1, although #dell slanted. I appreciate the comments.

By: Andreas Erson

Andreas Erson — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 12:13:02 +0000

In addition to these excellent points from mike I think you would have remembed the FlexMem-capability of the Dell M910 that you posted about a couple of days earlier. Being able to use all 32 dimm slots while only using 2 CPUs really make the M910 stand out compared to the Cisco and IBM offerings in regard to RAM per CPU ratio.

By: mike

mike — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 09:33:51 +0000

kevin,
I understand it is impossible to do winner/loser for this kind of thing as it really comes down to what an individual customer wants/needs. but i just have some comments:
1) Processor - real stretch to give IBM an advantage here:
- IBM doesn't offer the most attractive 6500 series procs (the 8 core) and they don't offer any 130W 7500 skus even in a 2S configuration. IBM talks about wanting to play in high memory 2S use cases, but they dont have the processor offerings to do that.
- i dont see how you take IBM connecting 2 HX5's together with a single point of failure (the "lego") to create a REALLY expensive 4S as an advantage. M910 scales from 2S to 4S just by removing the FlexMem bridges and adding procs. you end up with the same thing, but IBM takes a much more expensive, complex, and failure prone path to get there.
- Cisco doesn't offer 6500 series that i can see and i don't see them offering a 2S configuration. this is a major disadvantage
2) Memory
- don't be so sure about 16GB dimms not being used by customers, the cost is dropping dramatically on them as well as with 8GB dimms.
- not sure why cisco isn't talking about 16GB, but lack of 16GB support for IBM is due to them having to use VLP memory. the tradeoff to IBM requiring VLP memory in order to cram everything in is cost premium of the memory itself and also ability to hit the high capacity points.
3) Density
- more than pure servers/rack, the advantage M910 density has is that you get more leverage of the chassis & IO infrastructure, which lowers cost per unit.
4) Management
-first of all, doubt you'll run into anyone with 40 chassis on a pair of 6100s. cisco just came out with a new 8 port FEX for their chassis, so clearly they got pushback that the 4 uplinks they had previously was oversubscribed. the more uplinks you use out of their FEX, the lower the scope of management of the 6100.
-IBM, Dell, HP... everyone has 1:many consoles which can manage way more than 320 servers (rack/blade/tower).
-i'd be skeptical about something that is supposed to be super easy to manage, but requires you to go to a week of school to learn how to use.

By: Jake Tracy

Jake Tracy — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 03:32:17 +0000

Blades Made Simple » Blog Archive » New Cisco Blade Server: B440-M1 http://bit.ly/anlk7m

By: Kevin Houston

Kevin Houston — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 02:42:26 +0000

No info on #hp Nehalem EX blades yet. Maybe soon. Thanks for reading!

By: elidezman80

elidezman80 — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 02:34:03 +0000

any news about HP ?

By: Kevin Houston

Kevin Houston — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:40:02 +0000

New blog posting, New Cisco Blade Server: B440-M1 – http://tinyurl.com/yco2vop