Comments on: Yet Another Win for HP Blades, but Why?

By: Blades Made Simple™ » Blog Archive » Yet Another Movie Chooses HP

Blades Made Simple™ » Blog Archive » Yet Another Movie Chooses HP — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:12:28 +0000

[...] previously blogged about HP’s success with movie studios, but I would like to know if Dell or IBM have [...]

By: Yngdiego

Yngdiego — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 06:36:05 +0000

Maybe you should update your table now that HP has made some major blade server announcements. I think HP would get check marks in all areas except for the 'full access to memory on a 7500 with 2 CPUs.'

By: Kevin Houston

Kevin Houston — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:26:38 +0000

Oops – meant to have that say #dell has 32 CPUs in a full chassis while #hp has #64 CPUs in a full chassis. Thanks for catching that. I'll make an edit on the file as soon as I find the original. Thanks for reading!

By: Rafal

Rafal — Tue, 18 May 2010 11:50:28 +0000

I see that is a little mistake due to wrong number of maximum CPUs in Full Chassis, Dell has 16 dualsockets blades half hight, so in one chassis you have 32CPUs…

By: EACS Media

EACS Media — Mon, 10 May 2010 17:01:23 +0000

RT @HPEB_News: HP blades & workstation blades working in films like Avatar. 'Blades Made Simple' post here: http://ow.ly/1qwLuU

By: HPEnterpriseBusiness

HPEnterpriseBusiness — Mon, 10 May 2010 16:20:32 +0000

#HP blades + workstation blades = winning combination in films like Avatar. See Blades Made Simple post here: http://ow.ly/1qwLuU

By: Kevin Houston

Kevin Houston — Thu, 06 May 2010 01:54:49 +0000

Great input on why movie studios like #hp blades. I can see the need for LOTS of CPU power. As always, thanks for your comments!

By: Kevin Houston

Kevin Houston — Thu, 06 May 2010 01:52:58 +0000

Jason – thanks for the #hp links to workstation blades. Be looking for a post on this soon. Thanks for reading!

By: jasontreu

jasontreu — Tue, 04 May 2010 21:22:01 +0000

Hi Kevin,
Weta uses HP workstation blades.

Here are some others too:
http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/z-wor...
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/HP-S...
http://h20435.www2.hp.com/t5/Voodoo-Blog/bg-p/h...

Jason Treu
Disclaimer: work for HP

By: Daniel Bowers

Daniel Bowers — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:39:54 +0000

I think James hits it close: your list misses some key factors for the visual effects IT crowd. The bullets are probably too focused on the server hardware. Outfits like Weta Digital had to meet power & cooling requirements, compatibility with their storage architecture, management stacks, Linux distributions, and a bunch of other stuff. They probably also wanted to see track records with their industry-specific s/w like Renderman, Mental Ray, etc.

In terms of the specs on your chart, the ones that address density of 2-processor nodes are probably the most important. Cluster economics lead to the cheaper 2P processors, and "CG" software tends to be more compute-constrained than memory-constrained, so the high-CPU-count, moderate-DIMM-count BL2x220c hits a sweet spot. So the "2 servers on 1 blade" is probably the big difference on your chart.

A more real-world metric than "CPUs per enclosure" would be "CPUs per rack", where "rack" has both a physical limit (e.g. 42U) and a density limit on power, cooling, and network fabrics.

Disclaimer: I work for HP. Plus, "Mad Max 4" frightens me a bit.