Today IBM announced two new blade servers using Intel Xeon E5-2400 (Sandy Bridge-EN) processors.

BladeCenter HS23E

The BladeCenter HS23E is a two-socket server blade for the BladeCenter chassis.  It has 12 DIMM slots, two mezzanine ports, two hot-swap drive bays, and an integrated dual-port 1 Gigabit Ethernet adapter.

Like the HS23 announced in March, the HS23E has two mezzanine slots: one standard-speed CIOv slot, and one high-speed CFFh slot.  The CIOv slot has 8 lanes of PCIe Generation 3; the CFFs slot is connected with 16 lanes.

In addition to supporting the Xeon E5-2400 family of processors up to the E5-2470, 8-core, 2.3GHz chip, the HS23E also supports one-processor configurations using Intel Xeon E5-1400 or Intel Pentium 1400 processors.

The HS23E blade is supported in existing BladeCenter chassis, including the BladeCenter-H, -HT, -S, and –E.   When using 80- or 95-watt processors, there are some limits on using the HS23E in a BladeCenter-E chassis that uses 2000W power supplies.

Software RAID-0 and RAID-1 is supported using the integrated ServeRAID C105 controller.  An optional the ServeRAID H1135 controller, which occupies the CIOv slot, provides a 6Gbps hardware-based RAID option.

Two Expansion Blades are supported with the HS23E, which attach to the blade and occupy a second slot in the blade enclosure.  The Expansion Blade offers two PCI Express 2.0 slots.  The GPU Expansion Blade, which can be stacked, offer support for up to four NVidia GPU adapters.

IBM has posted a virtual tour of the HS23E IBM.

IBM Flex System x220 Compute Node

The Flex System x220 fits into IBM’s new Flex System family of components.  The blade-like Flex System components are used as building blocks for IBM’s pre-integrated PureFlex bundles, and are also available for build-your-own assemblages using the 14-bay, 10U Flex System Enterprise Chassis.

Like the HS23E, the Flex System x220 Compute Node is a two-socket server that uses Xeon E5-2400 processors up to 95 watts.  It has 12 DIMM slots supporting up to 192GB of memory.  There are two hot-swap, small form factor (SFF) drive bays for SAS, SATA or SSD drives.

The x220 has an integrated Broadcom BCM5718 dual-port Gigabit Ethernet controller.  The I/O connectors support daughtercards including 1GbE,  10GbE, FCoE, 8 and 16Gb FC, and FDR Infiniband adapter options.

Software RAID-0 and RAID-1 for SATA drives is supported using the integrated ServeRAID C105 controller.  Hardware-based RAID for SATA and SAS is available using an optional ServeRAID H1135 daughter card.  (The H1135 daughter card goes on a dedicated connector, and does not consume one of the blade’s two I/O slots.) 

A ServeRAID M5115 controller can be plugged into I/O adapter slot #1; this controller allows support for up to eight internal 1.8” solid-state drives, or a combination of internal solid-state drives and SFF drives in the hot-swap bays.

More details on the x220 Compute Node can be found here: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0885.html

Daniel Bowers is Vice President and Senior Analyst for Ideas International.  He possesses 19 years of IT industry experience in roles spanning server hardware and software engineering, product marketing, and server administration. His primary areas of expertise include blade servers, virtualization, and datacenter technologies.  This is Daniel’s first guest blog post for Blades Made Simple.  You can find out more about Daniel and Ideas International at http://www.ideasinternational.com/PDFs/Analyst-Biography-Daniel-Bowers.pdf

IBM officially announced their new blade, the HS23 blade server, and it comes with some improvement.

The HS23 blade server is a dual CPU socket blade running Intel´s new Xeon® processor, the E5-2600,  and is the first IBM BladeCenter server that offers four integrated LAN ports: dual-port Gigabit Ethernet and dual-port 10Gb Ethernet with IBM Virtual Fabric capability.

It has the same 30mm single-wide form-factor of all other IBM blades to protect customers’ investment by providing compatibility with the IBM BladeCenter H, E, S, and HT chassis.

The HS23 blade server  scales up to 14 virtual NICs (vNICs) per single-wide blade server for a total of 18 I/O ports with the choice of Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SAS, iSCSI, and FCoE connectivity.  One thing to note – this new high-speed adapter n the IBM HS23 blade server will work only in BladeCenter H chassis.  The blade server can provide up to four 10GbE (same as HS22 and HS22V), but the difference is that HS23 comes standard with  two 10GbE Virtual Fabric ports. Another CFFh virtual Fabric can be added to provide connectivity with the other two high-speed switches.

For those that are familiar with the I/O paths in Chassis H, here is how it works when using the Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapters:
 two 10 Gb Ethernet ports on the adapter itself are routed to the chassis I/O bays 8 and 10 (unlike other CFFh cards), and two 10 Gb Ethernet ports integrated on a blade itself are routed to the chassis I/O bays 7 and 9.

But if you do not want to use this technology (Virtual Fabric) you have to remove the 10Gb LOM Interposer in order to be able to add another CFFh expansion card like a QLogic Ethernet and 8Gb Fibre Channel Expansion Card, which enables connectivity between the blade and two Ethernet switches and two SAN switches.   Again, BladeCenter H only.

Other features of the HS23 blade server:

Processors

Up to two Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family CPUs with eight-core (up to 2.7 GHz) ; six-core (up to 2.9 GHz) ; quad-core (up to 2.4 GHz) or dual-core (up to 3.0 GHz). Two QPI links up to 8.0 GT/s each. Up to 1600 MHz memory speed. Up to 20 MB L3 cache.
Memory

Up to 16 DDR3 DIMM sockets (8 DIMMs per processor) using Very Low Profile (VLP) DIMMs. Support for up to 1600 MHz memory speed depending on the processor. Four memory channels per processor (2 DIMMs per channel). Up to 256 GB with 16x 16 GB RDIMMs and two processors.
Mixing 1.5 V and 1.35 V DIMMs in the same server is supported. In such a case all DIMMs operate at 1.5 V.
Disk Bays

Two 2.5″ hot-swap SAS/SATA drive bays supporting SAS, SATA, and SSD drives.

HS23 comes to replace both HS22 and HS22V on IBM portfolio. Positioned just below HX5, HS23 is designed to meet the needs of small/ midsized businesses and is ideal for a variety of workloads including virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions.

About the Author

Thales Osterne is a contributor and author for BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over seven years in the IT field with five years of experience in IBM BladeCenter and System X.  When he is not blogging, Thales works as a product manager for IBM System X & Bladecenter at Lanlink Informatica, a major business partner in Brazil.

Hot off the presses is the latest IDC worldwide server market revenue report for Q3 2011. The gist of the report is that while some of the numbers are slightly adjusted, really not much has changed in the blade server market.

Revenue growth for the entire server market (all servers, not just blade servers) slowed considerably showing only 4.2% year over year growth bringing in $12.7 billion. Growth in the world of servers continues but this marks the slowest growth rate for any quarter since Q1 2010. IDC believes that overall server sales will continue to decelerate due to weakening economic conditions around the globe. “After nearly two years of steady revenue growth, the server market began to decelerate in Q3 2011 as demand stabilized for many system categories,” said Matt Eastwood, group VP and general manager. Incidentally, IBM and HP are both holding steady, tied for the #1 spot in revenue share, at 29.8%.

When looking at the blade server market specifically, growth was steady for Q3 2011 but not as explosive as Q2 2011. IDC reports “solid growth” in the quarter with a revenue increase of 16.4% year over year (vs 26.9% growth in 2Q11). Shipments increased 2.4% (vs 6.2% reported growth for 2Q11). One thing that hasn’t changed since last quarter is that 89% of all blade revenue is driven by x86 systems. Also, blade server sales representing  20.8% of all x86 server revenue. This shows continued steady growth for the blade server segment but that the pace may be slowing slightly.

#1 market share: HP managed to hold the majority margin moving to 51.0% in Q3 2011 from 51.9% in Q2 2011.

#2 market share: IBM continues to see its margin chipped away slightly down to 18.5% in Q3 2011 from 19.1% in Q2 2011.

#3 market share: Cisco’s disruptive market penetration seems to have slowed at 10.7% overall compared to a solid 10% in Q2 2011.

#4 market share: Even Dell dropped slightly to 7.2% revenue share from 8.2% last quarter.

In looking at the totals, the top four vendors represented 87.4% of the revenue share in the blade servers market which is actually down 2% from last quarter. Cisco grew revenue share by less than 1% which means that some of the displacement of the remaining top vendors is not accounted for. Does this mean there may be some new players in the “others” category that we should be watching? Without a detailed breakdown it’s hard to tell but I’ll definitely be looking forward to comparing the numbers next quarter to see if the trend continues. It could, after all, just be a factor of the margin of error in the statistics.

According to Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC, “Blade systems represented the fastest growing segment in the server industry and now account for 16.0% of total server revenue – a historic high.”

Probably the most interesting aspect of the report is the introduction of hyper-scale servers. “Hyper-scale servers are designed for large scale datacenters with streamlined system designs that focus on performance, energy efficiency, and density.” This sounds like the mantra for blade servers with the main difference being the lack of management and high availability capabilities at the hardware level. Basically these represent the miles of simple, rack mount commodity servers used by the likes of Google and Facebook. This is a $428 million dollar server segment and growing.

For the full IDC report covering the Q2 2011 Worldwide Server Market, please visit IDC’s website at http://www.idc.com.

People are always asking me: “how many blades I have to put in a chassis to make it worth?” My answer is always: “It depends!” . There is no magical number.

First of all, you have to buy* a chassis and since Blade servers are cheaper than rack servers (considering the same configuration), you can save on TAC (total acquisition cost) depending on how many blades you put into each chassis.

Also, even if the customer wants just a couple blades, depending on how many I/O modules you will put into a chassis, it could be cheaper than a complex solution involving two or three vendors and less discount.

This comparison is just about TAC, I will not get into all the benefits of a Blade environment.

Rack servers will have advantage for a customer that has the I/O  infrastructure and wants to buy just a few servers and not be tied to a vendor specific technology.

*Both HP (post here) and IBM (post here) have promotions that give free Enclosures/Chassis on your first buy.

My experience says that is better if a customer buy only the minimum necessary to apply for the promotion and request a discount on the rest of the configuration.

About the Author
Thales Osterne is a contributor and author for BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over six years in the IT field with four years of experience in IBM BladeCenter and System X.  When he is not blogging, Thales works as a product manager for IBM System X & Bladecenter at Lanlink Informatica, a major business partner in Brazil.  He is fluent in Portuguese and English.

Not long ago it was reported that IBM was having a promotion to receive a free blade enclosure if you are a first time customer and the chassis in question is eligible. Details can be found in the following links:

Link to blog post about IBM offer
Link to actual IBM offer

More recently we posted info that HP was offering something very similar. The main difference was that HP’s promotion requires that you purchase some hardware to get the free enclosure.

Link to HP promotion

Since I’m a HP blades customer and I’ve been planning on adding some additional blade servers soon I thought I’d better follow up and get details on the whole deal. What I found out was a bit disappointing.

Basically the blades you have to buy in order to get a “free” enclosure are pre-configured and you cannot customize them when you order. Specifically, they are DL460 G7’s and only have a single processor (Intel® Xeon® X5675 (3.06GHz/6-core/12MB/95W, DDR3-1333) with 12GB of RAM and no HDD. If you don’t like that configuration you’ll need to buy the additional or replacement parts separately and install them yourself. That may not be a deal breaker but still a bit annoying that the configuration is so rigid.

The enclosure, on the other hand, was configured better than I expected. There are no  interconnect modules (naturally) but the c7000 chassis comes with 6 power supplies, 10 Fans, 16 ICE Licenses and is setup for single-phase power (6 power cords out the back). The chassis configuration, such as it is, is also not configurable so if you use three phase power or direct DC current then you’ll be changing out the power connector or adjusting your circuits to match.

It’s a shame that the configurations are not adjustable and I’m unsure whether the cost savings will be worth the hassle of mix-matching parts to get the configuration I actually want. I don’t have any pricing yet but once I find out the general difference between buying the blades and chassis separately through my own channels versus the special promotion I’ll let you know if it’s a deal worth looking into.

Till next time,
Chris Fricke

Chris is a contributor and author for BladesMadeSimple.com and in his day job is a Systems Architect for Clackamas County in Oregon and an HP customer.  The opinions expressed in his writings do not ncessarily reflect those of BladesMadeSimple or Chris’ employer.  Follow Chris on Twitter @sysgeekguy.

Since my last post, I heard lots of rumors that VMware would make some changes in their new licensing model. Well, this week VMware made an official announcement of changes and posted here.

VMware made very clear that all the changes were motivated by the feedbacks they have received:

“These changes generated debate in the blogosphere, across the VMware communities, and in conversations with customers and partners.  Some of the discussion had to do with confusion around the changes.  We have been watching the commentaries on the blogs very carefully, and we have been listening in the customer conversations very intently. We got a ton of feedback that probed the impact of the new licensing model on every possible use case and scenario, and equally important, reflected our customers’ intense passion for VMware.” Said the Product management VP, Bogomil Balkansky.

This shows how important feedback is! We can say that changes come from us.

So, let´s see the new comparison of vSphere 4.x licensing vs the vSphere 5 model:

To see the original document, click here.

The main changes:

• Increased vRAM entitlements for all vSphere editions, including the doubling of the entitlements for vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.
• Capped the amount of vRAM  in any given VM by 96GB.
• Compliance policies will not be measured by high watermark. Instead, a 12 months rolling average of daily high watermark. That´s very important for testing and developing environments.

Plus: An official monitoring tool will replace all the scripts that have been circulating around the community to calculate how much “vRAM” customers are using now.

VMware confirmed that the new licensing model was made to keep up with the market changes and that changes are unlike, but necessary.

So, to compare apples to apples, let’s use the same example of last post: an IBM HX5 blade server with MAX5 maxed out with 640GB of memory with the NEW (I mean the newest) licensing model a user would need 7 VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus Licenses to be “legal” vs 14 of the previous vSphere 5 licensing vs 2 with the current VMware vSphere 4.x licensing model.

That´s more reasonable. Especially if keep in mind that customers would not use all the physical RAM in the vRAM pool. They must have some free physical RAM to be able to do a vMotion for example.

We have to give VMware some credit to change so quickly and listen the community. Would any other vendor do something like this? I don´t know.

About the Author
Thales Osterne is a contributor for BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over six years in the IT field with four years of experience in IBM BladeCenter and System X.  When he is not blogging, Thales works as a product manager for IBM System X & Bladecenter at Lanlink Informatica, a major business partner in Brazil.  He is fluent in Portuguese and English.

In case you haven’t heard, “cloud” discussions are here to stay and everyone has their own recommendations for you to start building your cloud environment, but which is best for you?  Intel has created the “Intel® Cloud Builders” program aimed at making it easier for you to build, enhance and operate cloud infrastructure.

The Intel® Cloud Builders site is a collection of Cloud Design architectures resources from all of the major vendors like Cisco, EMC, Dell, HP and IBM.  Once you understand your cloud requirements then you can filter through the architectures based on one or more of the following:

1) Usage Models

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Policy-Based Power Management
• Scale-out Storage
• Trusted Compute Pools
• Unified Networking
• Client-Aware (self-service)

2) Cloud Computing Categories

• Build and Simply Your (existing) Cloud
• Improve Efficiency
• Enhance Security

3) Preferred Ecosystem Partner (allows you to pick your preferred hardware or software vendor)

While the site provides useful information, it is still limited.  For example a search in “all Dell” within the Content Library returns 3 documents; “all Cisco” returns 1 document and “all HP” returns 2 documents.  I see really good potential for this site, but Intel and their Ecosystem Partners are going to need to provide more documentation.  I would also like to see Intel introduce a filtering category that allows you to choose between rack servers and blade servers. 

Overall, I would give the site a 3 out of 5, so if you are looking for a resource to help you with your cloud design, check out Intel® Cloud Builders at http://www.intelcloudbuilders.com/

I was recently on one of those calls from HP “checking in”. If you are an HP customer you may know these calls start off with something like “We know you spent money on HP last quarter so how many people from this company will have to pester you until you buy more stuff from us?” One of the things the HP rep mentioned towards the end the process, however, is that until October HP is now offering a free blade enclosure with the purchase of four HP BL460′s.  I have to admit, I haven’t talked to anyone about the gritty details yet but this sounds awfully familiar to the promotion that IBM is having that was reported here earlier this month. I did some research online and found a few links with various versions (or at least descriptions) of this offer including one for UK customers that is about to expire:

Link 1
Link 2

Incidentally, I did some poking around directly on the HP site and found no advertisements or even mention of the “free chassi” promotional offer.   It seems to be a weak promotion if there’s nothing to indicate that it even exists. Regardless, does this mean that Dell is next? Does this mean that Cisco UCS is more disruptive than the HP, IBM or Dell are letting on or is it simply a case of corporate “me too”? Seems like a silly bandwagon to jump on given that most of the cost is not in the chassis, but in the I/O modules. Give away a free enclosure with a pair of Flex-10 modules installed and then you’ll have my undivided attention, Mr. HP. Kudos.

Chris is a contributor and author for BladesMadeSimple.com and in his day job is a Systems Architect for Clackamas County in Oregon and an HP customer.  The opinions expressed in his writings do not ncessarily reflect those of BladesMadeSimple or Chris’ employer.  Follow Chris on Twitter @sysgeekguy.

As you no doubt heard by now, VMware has announced a new version of vSphere along with some new or improved features however, this post will not highlight these features.  In this post, I want to talk about what did not improve – the licensing. 
 
With the announcement of the VMware vSphere 5, the biggest thing that startles me is the way that VMware has found to a way to collect more revenue from users with new server technologies. This seems to be totally going against the flow of x86 market since the main message of the major server manufacturers (in the past) has been how they can save users $$ on VMware licensing by offering the ability to stack your servers full of memory.  

For example – take a look at the IBM HX5 blade server combined with the MAX 5 which provides users with a total of 40 memory DIMM slots and a current maximum of 640GB using only two processors.  Taking a look at the comparison, with the previous vSphere 4.x licensing, you would only need two VMware vSphere 4.x Enterprise Plus licenses. (With 640GB of RAM, one can only imagine how many virtual machines were possible with just 2 licenses.)
 
Since more users were moving to at the architecture of larger 2 socket systems with A LOT of memory, I believe that VMware realized the vSphere licensing  opportunities were than they expected so they decided to change their licensing method  to  a “per CPU and memory” licensing model creating the concept of a processor and vRAM pooling of entitlements.
 
Here is a look at a comparison of vSphere 4.x licensing vs the vSphere 5 model:

 
So, if we use the example of a the IBM HX5 blade with MAX5 mentioned above maxed out with 640GB of memory with the NEW licensing model a user would need 14 VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus Licenses to be “legal” vs 2 with the current VMware vSphere 4.x licensing model. 
 
According to VMware, the good news is that there is “no limit to the number of cores per processor”, but in reality  – I don’t see that that as a big deal. vSphere 4.X already supported 12 cores per processor with vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses which is the maximum of the current market  – even the next generation Intel 2 socket CPU will only be 8 cores – so there is no advantage to changing the licensing.  This is why many people are calling this new licensing model “vRAM Tax“.
 
We all agree that VMware has the best products and is the market leader for virtualization, BUT this new licensing model is giving ammo to Microsoft and Citrix to strike at the cost issue (which was already an issue in VS 4.x).

About the Author
Thales Osterne is a contributor for BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over six years in the IT field with four years of experience in IBM BladeCenter and System X.  When he is not blogging, Thales works as a product manager for IBM System X & Bladecenter at Lanlink Informatica, a major business partner in Brazil.  He is fluent in Portugese and English.

Many people get confused as to why so many I/O modules are needed within a given blade chassis.  The basic concept is simple (in most cases) – for each port you need on a given blade server, you need to have a corresponding I/O module.  For example, if you need 4 NICs, you’re going to need 4 Ethernet modules (in most cases.)  In today’s post, I thought I would keep it simple and publish the I/O diagrams of Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM chassis.  Of course, I am human and “have been known to make mistakes – from time to time” so please feel free to correct me on any errors you see.  Enjoy.

(Updated 8/3/2011 – fixed Dell M1000e Full Height I/O Diagram)