Today, Dell announced the addition of 3 new blade servers to its PowerEdge portfolio – the PowerEdge M820, PowerEdge M520 and the PowerEdge M420.  Each server offers a unique addition to the Dell blade server family and will be available soon.

 PowerEdge M820

The PowerEdge M820 is a full-height, 4-socket blade server that is the first to use the Intel Xeon E5-4600 processor family.  The M820 has 48 DIMMs for up to 1.5TB of memory and comes with 2 x Select Network Adapters providing a choice between 10Gb Brocade, Broadcom or QLogic.  The server also has 4 additional I/O mezzanine card slots capable of holding additional 10Gb, Infiniband or Fibre cards.  The PowerEdge M820 will be available to purchase in mid-Q2 2012.  Find out more at:

http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-m820/pd?~ck=anav

PowerEdge M520

If you are familiar with the Dell PowerEdge M610 blade server, then the new PowerEdge M520 shouldn’t be any surprise to you.  It offers the same form factor and the same amount of memory, but is based on the newer Intel Sandy Bridge CPU.  The PowerEdge M520 is a half-height, 2-socket blade server that uses the Intel Xeon E5-2400 processor family.  As with most of the servers in the E5-2400 family, the M520 has 12 DIMMs for up to 192GB of memory.  Unlike the M820 or the M620, the PowerEdge M520 does not come with the Select Network Adapter, but instead comes standard with 4 x 1GbE Dual Port LOM.  (It is important to note, that a 48-port Blade Module, like the PowerConnect M6348, is required to have all 4 NICs available for use; otherwise only 2 of the 4 are available.) The server also has 2 additional I/O mezzanine card slots capable of holding additional 10Gb, Infiniband or Fibre cards.  The PowerEdge M520 is scheduled to be available for purchase in the next few weeks.  Find out more at:

http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-m520/pd?~ck=anav

PowerEdge M420

The PowerEdge M420 is a quarter-height, 2-socket blade server that uses the Intel Xeon E5-2400 processor family.  The M420 introduces a new concept to Dell’s blade family by allowing up to 32 servers within a single Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade chassis.  Each PowerEdge M420 blade server has up to 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2400 CPUs, 6 DIMM slots (for up to 96GB of memory), 2 internal SD slots, a Dual Port 10Gb Broadcom 57810s onboard NIC, 1 x mezzanine expansion.

The M420 quarter-height blades are deployed in the M1000e using a full-height sleeve known as a “subassembly”.  While each sleeve does not need to be fully populated with M420 blades in order to be installed, it does occupy the same physical space as a full-height blade, however it can be positioned adjacent to other half-height servers.  The M420 offers a great platform for any application using a lot of CPU processing.  A 42U rack can hold 4 x Dell PowerEdge M1000e chassis and each chassis can hold 32 PowerEdge M420 server.  That means you can have up to 128 Dell PowerEdge M420s in a rack.  Each M420 can hold 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2400 CPUs with a total of 16 CPU cores so that equates to 2,048 CPU cores in a rack. 

The PowerEdge M420 is scheduled to be available for purchase in the next few weeks.  Find out more at: http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-m420/pd?~ck=anav

For a list of all of Dell’s blade server offerings, visit http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-mseries-servers?~ck=anav

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.  Kevin works for Dell as a Server Specialist covering the Global 500 East market.

Dell recently published a new whitepaper that compares the performance and power efficiency of four of the Dell PowerEdge M710HD and M620 blades vs. four of the Cisco B250 M2 blade servers.  Here is a summary of the key findings:

Performance / watt

The higher performance and lower power draw of the four-blade Dell solutions compared to the UCS B250 M2 blade solution led to the PowerEdge M710HD solution’s 76% higher performance per watt score and the PowerEdge M620 solution’s 108% higher performance per watt score.

Power at Idle

Even with all blades configured with the same amount of system memory, the four-blade PowerEdge M710HD solution consumed 58% as much power at idle as the four-blade UCS B250 M2 solution with its extra DIMMs and supporting circuitry. Similarly, the four-blade PowerEdge M620 blade solution drew just 55% as much power at idle as the Cisco blade solution.

Power at 100% Load

Both of the four-blade PowerEdge solutions, again with the same amount of system memory installed per blade, drew 64% to 67% as much power as the four-blade Cisco UCS B250 M2 blade solution with all blades running at 100% load.

Performance

With the same processor models and the same memory capacity installed in each blade, the four-blade solution based on PowerEdge M710HD blades provided up to 11% higher performance than the four-blade solution based on UCS B250 M2 blades, and the four-blade solution based on PowerEdge M620 blades provided up to 25% higher performance than the UCS blade solution.

Rack density

When the 10U M1000e Modular Blade Enclosure is equipped with its maximum of sixteen M710HD or M620 servers, the solution can fit 1.6 servers per rack unit of space, 2.4 times as dense as the solution with Cisco UCS B250 M2 blades.

Cost

In the configuration tested, the Cisco UCS B250 M2 blade solution costs $112,591.02[1], while the similarly configured Dell PowerEdge M710HD solution costs 34% less at $73,820.00, and the PowerEdge M620 solution costs 33% less at $75,372.00.

To read the report in its entirety, please visit:

http://i.dell.com/sites/content/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/PowerEfficiencyComparisonofDellandCiscoHighMemoryCapacityBladeServers.pdf

To read the writer’s blog post on this report, visit:

http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/enterprise/b/inside-enterprise-it/archive/2012/03/26/comparison-of-dell-and-cisco-high-memory-capacity-blade-servers.aspx

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.  Kevin works for Dell as a Server Specialist covering the Global 500 East market.

Dell introduced today a new 40Gb Ethernet Switch module for its Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade system.  The Dell Force10 MXL 10/40GbE switch is the first Force10 product introduced to the Dell blade server platform.  The Force10 MXL 10/40GbE is a 1/10/40GbE Layer 2 and Layer 3 blade switch and is powered by the Force10 operating system (FTOS). 

It will offer 32 internal 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports and up to 240Gb of Ethernet uplinks. 

Some of the key features of the Dell Force10 MXL 10/40GbE switch:

• Ethernet stacking of up to six switching modules within a single enclosure or spanning multiple enclosures to be managed as one logical device.
• Networking flexibility with FlexIO modules that provide support for 40GbE QSFP+, 10GbE SFP+, and 10GBase-T ports.
• Support for end-to-end IP storage (iSCSI and Data Center Bridging) into a single 10GbE connection.

According to the Dell press release, the Dell Force10 MXL 10/40GbE will be available this summer.  More details will follow as it is released.

Media Links:

“Dell brings 40-Gigabit Ethernet to PowerEdge blades” – ComputerWorld.com

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9226502/Dell_brings_40_Gigabit_Ethernet_to_PowerEdge_blades?taxonomyId=154&pageNumber=1

“Dell Unveils 40GbE-Enabled Networking Switch” – eWeek

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Networking/Dell-Unveils-40GbEEnabled-Networking-Switch-716536/

“Dell Builds on Force10 for Virtual Networking” – Enterprise Networking Planet

http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/datacenter/dell-builds-on-force10-for-virtual-networking.html

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.  Kevin works for Dell as a Server Specialist covering the Global 500 East market.

One of the industry-leading independent technology assessment service firms, Principled Technologies, just updated their site with a ton of white papers covering performance on just about any product or technology.  You can check out their website at http://www.principledtechnologies.com/default.htm for the complete list, but I wanted to give you the links to their papers that cover virtualization performance on blade servers.

These are the newest white papers, and yes they are mostly Dell.  However, keep an eye on

http://www.principledtechnologies.com/Topics/servers.htm as I’m sure they’ll have HP, IBM and Cisco papers up soon.

    

	Database server consolidation with an Intel Xeon processor E5-2690-based server We tested to see how many dual-socket quad-core legacy servers this new server could consolidate using virtualization.
	Server consolidation and TCO: Dell PowerEdge M620 vs. HP ProLiant BL490 We examine the number of virtual machines each server could support and the total cost of ownership for each server over 3 years.
	Server consolidation and TCO: Dell PowerEdge M620 vs. Dell PowerEdge M710HD We examine the number of virtual machines each server could support and the total cost of ownership for each server over 3 years.
	Server consolidation and TCO: Dell PowerEdge M620 vs. Dell PowerEdge M610 We examine the number of virtual machines each server could support and the total cost of ownership for each server over 3 years

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.    Kevin works for Dell as a Server Specialist covering the Global 500 East market.

(UPDATED 3/7/12) With the launch of Intel’s Xeon E5-2600 processor, Dell revealed the details of the new PowerEdge M620 blade server.  Offering an industry first 24 memory DIMMs in a half-height form factor, the M620 offers up to 768GB of RAM along side the newly announced Intel E5-2600.  The Dell PowerEdge M620 also comes with the ability to chose from a variety of LOM (LAN on Motherboard) cards – a feature first seen in the PowerEdge M710HD and M915 last Summer.  Formerly known as the Network Daughter Card, the newly renamed feature, called Select Network Adapter, is a removable network card that gives buyers the option of choosing from Broadcom, Intel or QLogic adapters – each offering up to two ports of 10Gb.  Since it is removable, it offers investment protection as new technology becomes available.  For more features and details about the M620, see below.

CPU Offerings

At the time of launch, Dell is offering the following Intel E5-2600 CPUs on the M620:

Intel® Xeon® E5-2650L 1.80GHz, 20M Cache, 8.0GT/s QPI, Turbo, 8C, 70W
Intel® Xeon® E5-2650 2.00GHz, 20M Cache, 8.0GT/s QPI, Turbo, 8C, 95W
Intel® Xeon® E5-2660 2.20GHz, 20M Cache, 8.0GT/s QPI, Turbo, 8C, 95W
Intel® Xeon® E5-2665 2.40GHz, 20M Cache, 8.0GT/s QPI, Turbo, 8C, 115W
Intel® Xeon® E5-2670 2.60GHz, 20M Cache, 8.0GT/s QPI, Turbo, 8C, 115W
Intel® Xeon® E5-2680 2.70GHz, 20M Cache, 8.0GT/s QPI, Turbo, 8C, 130W

Intel® Xeon® E5-2630L 2.00GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, 6C, 60W
Intel® Xeon® E5-2620 2.00GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, 6C, 95W
Intel® Xeon® E5-2630 2.30GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, 6C, 95W
Intel® Xeon® E5-2640 2.50GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, 6C, 95W
Intel® Xeon® E5-2667 2.90GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, 6C, 130W

Intel® Xeon® E5-2603 1.80GHz,10M Cache, 6.4GT/s QPI, No Turbo, 4C, 80W
Intel® Xeon® E5-2609 2.40GHz, 10M Cache, 6.4GT/s QPI, No Turbo, 4C, 80W
Intel® Xeon® E5-2637 3.0GHz, 5M cache, 6.4 GT/s QPI, Turbo, 2C, 80W

If you have software licensed by the core, you’ll be happy to see the E5-2637 CPU, which offers 2 CPU cores while maintaining a high 3.0GHz frequency.

Memory

Although the maximum memory speed with the Romley platform running the Intel Xeon E5-2600 CPU touts a 1600MHz memory performance speed, there is a trade off on capacity.  Basically, if you want a lot of memory, you’ll have to run the memory at a slower speed at 1033.   To help determine performance vs capacity, I’ve listed a chart below that should help decode things.  In the spirit of full disclosure, the 32GB DIMMs, which are required to achieve the maximum capacity of 768GB RAM, will not be available until Q2 2012 (date not provided at this time.)  To aid with your memory selection, check out:

http://www.poweredgecpumemory.com

LAN on Motherboard Options

As mentioned above, the PowerEdge M620’s on-board network is available in removable card, known as the Select Network Adapter.  While this is new to the M6xx family, it is Dell’s second generation of removal LOM cards.  In fact, with the 12G product launch, the Select Network Adapter can be found in the R620 and R720 rack servers too.  Below is a chart of the 3 card options, as well as the features they support.  In summary, if you want SR-IOV or DCB Support, you’ll want to go with the Intel X520 card – otherwise it’s a battle between Broadcom and QLogic.REVISED 3/7/12  – I clearly was under the influence of lack of sleep when I wrote this.  The matrix was all messed up.  Here is the CORRECT list of supported options:

Other New Options

The PowerEdge M620 comes with 2 x mezzanine I/O card expansion slots (x8 PCIe 3.0) fully available in both the 1 CPU and 2 CPU blade server designs.  I was planning on listing the options available for the mezzanine slots on the M620, but the list is too long, however you can find it on the M620 page at http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-m620/pd?~ck=anav.  Instead, I want to touch on a couple of other cool features that you might find valuable.

Dual embedded SD slots for Hypervisor – since the market is heading toward encouraging embedded hypervisors, Dell decided to place dual card slots into the M620 designed to be redundant.  If you lose your primary SD card, the secondary slot is available to resume the workload.

Now, for my final trick – SCAN THIS QR Tag:

Welcome to the future.  No longer will you have to search for assistance with a server product.  With the 12th Generation of the Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell is introducing the concept of using QR tags to offer technical assistance in the form of step-by-step videos, reference materials and even help with looking up your service tag.

For more information on the Dell PowerEdge M620, download the the full  PowerEdge M620 Technical Guide or visit http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-m620/pd?~.

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.    Kevin works for Dell as a Server Specialist covering the Global 500 East market.

The International Data Corporation’s (IDC) released their  Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker today covering Q4 2011.  Despite a 7.2% decrease in the worldwide server factory revenue, the blade market continued to experience growth in 4Q11 with factory revenue increasing 8.3% year over year.   Other key facts from the IDC press release:

• Bladed servers (including x86, EPIC, and RISC blades) accounted for $2.3 billion in revenues, or 16.1% of quarterly server market revenue.
• 89.6% of all blade revenue is driven by x86-based blades, which now represent 22.5% of all x86 server revenue.

HP maintained the number 1 spot in the server blade market in 4Q11 with 47.4% revenue share – down from 51% in 3Q11, while IBM grew from 18.2% in 3Q11 to 21.5% revenue share in 4Q11. Cisco and Dell rounded out the top 4 blade server vendors with 11.0% and 8.7% factory revenue share, gaining 5.3 and 1.3 points of blade market share, respectively from Q311.

According to Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC, “While there was softness in other segments, blades remained a strong point and continued as a driver of growth for the server market. The blade server category achieved both its highest reported revenue and revenue share in the fourth quarter of 2011.  IDC believes blades are a key element in a server vendor’s portfolio as they are a strategic footprint in the datacenter and important for vendor revenue and profitability. A converged blade platform is an opportunity for additional pull-through revenue beyond the server, including storage, networking, software, and services.”

For the full IDC report covering the Q4 2011 Worldwide Server Market, please visit IDC’s website at:
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23347812

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.    Kevin works for Dell as a Server Specialist covering the Global 500 East market.

As I mentioned yesterday, one of my fellow bloggers, Stephen Foskett, is writing a series on blade servers.  His latest post reveals the history of the blade server.  Stephen’s article challenged me to do some research of my own – and here’s what I found.   Apparently the first “official” patent for a server on blade (patent # 6,411,506 - “High density web server chassis system and method) was awarded in June of 2002 to Christopher G. Hipp and David M. Kirkeby of RLX Technologies.   One interesting fact is that U.S. Patents referenced within the document refers to other patents from many leaders of the industry including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Micron, Hitachi and even Dell.

I’ve taken the liberty of downloading the entire patent document for your reference:
High Density Web Server Chassis – Patent 6411506 B1 (1.84Mb, PDF).

If you like technology and are a history buff, I recommend you check out Stephen’s article at http://blog.fosketts.net/2012/02/20/blade-server-history/.

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.    Kevin works for Dell as a Server Specialist covering the Global 500 East market.

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.

In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that engineers would be able to double the number of components on a microchip every two years.  Known as Moore’s law, his prediction has come true – processors are continuing to become faster each year while the components are becoming smaller and smaller.  In the footprint of the original ENIAC computer, we can today fit thousands of CPUs that offer a trillion more computes per seconds at a fraction of the cost.  This continued trend is allowing server manufactures to shrink the footprint of the typical x86 blade server allowing more I/O expansion, more CPUs and more memory.  Will this continued trend allow blade servers to gain market share, or could it possibly be the end of rack servers?  My vision of the next generation data center could answer that question. 

Before I begin, I want to emphasize that although I work for Dell, these ideas that I’ve come up with through my experience in the blade server market and from discussions with industry peers.  They are my personal visions and do not reflect those of Dell nor are the ideas mentioned below limited to Dell products and technology. 

The First Evolution of the Blade Server – Less I/O Expansion
Last November I wrote an article of my first vision of “The Blade Server of the Future” on CRN.com.  In the article, I described two future evolutions of the blade server.  The first was the integration of a shared storage environment (below).  While the image depicts the HP BladeSystem C7000 modified with storage, my idea stems from the increase of onboard NICs driving a lot of the individual blade traffic.  With 10Gb / CNA technologies being introduced as a standard offering, and with 40Gb Ethernet around the corner, the additional mezzanine cards and I/O expansion found on today’s blade server technology may not be required in the near future.  The space freed up from the removal of the un-needed I/O bays could be used for something like an integrated storage area network, or perhaps for PCI expansion.

The Next Evolution of the Blade Server – External I/O Expansion
PCI expansion is another possible evolution within the blade server market.  As CPUs continue to shrink, the internal real estate of blade servers increase, allowing for more memory expansion.  However, as more memory is added, less room for I/O cards is available.  While I mention that additional I/O may not be needed on blade servers with the standardization of large onboard Ethernet NICs, the reality is that as you cram more into a blade server, the more I/O will be required.  I believe we’ll see external I/O expansion become standard in future evolutions of blade servers.  Users of RISC technologies will be quick to identify that external I/O is nothing new and in fact, even in the x86 space has been an option through Xsigo.com however my vision is that the external capability would be an industry standard like USB or HDMI.  While the idea of a standardized external I/O capability like shown in the image below is probably more of a dream than a reality, it leads to my long term vision of where blade servers will eventually evolve to.

The Future of the Blade Server – Modular Everything
Blade servers rely on connectivity to the outside world through a mid-plane and I/O modules.  They are containerized within the chassis that houses them allowing them to be an ecosystem for compute resources.  What if we took the idea of how the blades connect to the blade chassis and extended it to an entire rack?  Imagine having a shelf of blade servers that docked directly to a rack midplane (aka a “rackplane”).  In fact, anything could be designed with this connectivity: storage trays, PCIe trays, power trays.  What ever technology you need, be it compute power, storage or I/O could be added as needed.   The beauty of this design is that the compute nodes could communicate with the storage nodes at “line speed” without the need for point-to-point cabling because they are all tied into the “rackplane”.  Here’s what I think it would look like:

On the front side of the modular rack, a user would have the option to plug in whatever is needed.  For servers, I envision half-size blade servers housed in a 1 or 2U shelf.  The shelf could hold any number of servers, but I would expect that a shelf of 8 – 12 servers would be ideal.  Keep in mind, in this vision, all we need are CPUs and memory inside of a “blade server” so the physical footprint of the future blade server could be the size of today’s full-length PCIe card.  Each of the shelves, whether they are servers, storage or compute, would have docking connectors similar to what we see on today’s blade servers but on a much larger scale.  On the back side of the modular rack, you would have the option to add in battery protection (UPS), cooling and of course, I/O connectivity to your data center core fabrics. 

One of the most obvious disadvantages of this design is that if you had a problem with your “RackPlane”, it would take a lot of resources off line.  While that would be the case, I would expect that the design would have multiple rackplanes in place that would be serviceable.  Of course, if the racks were stacked side-by-side with other racks, that could pose a problem – but hey, I’m just envisioning the future, I’m not designing it…

What are your thoughts on this?  Am I totally crazy, or do you think we could see this in the next 10 years?  I’d love your thoughts, comments or arguments.   Thanks for reading.

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 14 plus years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.    Kevin works for Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global 500 market.

If you are a reader of BladesMadeSimple, you are no stranger to Dell’s Network Daughter Card (NDC), but if it is a new term for you, let me give you the basics. Up until now, blade servers came with network interface cards (NICs) pre-installed as part of the motherboard.  Most servers came standard with Dual-port 1Gb Ethernet NICs on the motherboard, so if you invested into a 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) or other converged technologies, the onboard NICs were stuck at 1Gb Ethernet.  As technology advanced and 10Gb Ethernet became more prevalent in the data center, blade servers entered the market with 10GbE standard on the motherboard.  If, however, you weren’t implementing 10GbE then you found yourself paying for technology that you couldn’t use.  Basically, what ever came standard on the motherboard is what you were stuck with – until now.

 Dell has broken the long-standing design concept of embedding the LAN onto the motherboard (aka LOM) and replaced it with a small, removable mezzanine card called a Network Daughter Card, or NDC.  The NDC provides the buyer with a flexibility of choosing what they want ( 4 x 1GbE, 2 x 10GbE or 2 x Converged Network Adapter.)  This innovation is exciting to me, as it not only provides a possible upgrade path to future technologies, but it also changes the way we look at server technology.  No longer does the on-board NIC have to be integrated onto the motherboard, but it can be a removable card that can be easily replaced or upgraded.  In a few years when this is standard architecture on every x86 server, remember where you saw it first.

But wait – there’s more.  In addition the NDC is the first adapter to offer the industry’s first network partitioning, or “NPAR” scheme that makes it possible to split the 10GbE pipe while working with any of the Dell PowerEdge M1000e 10GbE Ethernet Switch Modules.  So, what’s the big deal about NPAR?  Let me explain.

With the increased amount of virtualization in the data center, combined with an increase in data and cloud computing, the network’s efficiency is becoming compromised driving many organizations to embrace a 10GbE network.  While moving to a more robust 10GbE environment may be ideal for an organization, it also brings challenges like ensuring that the appropriate bandwidth for all resources is available in both the physical and virtual environments.  This is where NPAR comes in.  Network Partitioning allows for administrators to split up  the 10GbE pipes on the NDC into 4 separate partitions or physical functions and allocate bandwidth and resources as needed.  Each of the four partitions is an actual PCI Express function that appears in the blade server’s system ROM, O/S or virtual O/S as a separate physical NIC. 

Each partition can support networking features such as:

• TCP checksum offload
• Large send offload
• Transparent Packet Aggregation (TPA)
• Multiqueue receive-side scaling
• VM queue (VMQ) feature of the Microsoft® Hyper-V™ hypervisor
• Internet SCSI (iSCSI) HBA
• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) HBA.

Administrators can enable/disable any of the features per partition and they configure a partition to run iSCSI, FCoE, and TCP/ IP Offload Engine (TOE) simultaneously.

Each of the four partitions per port (8 per NDC) can be set up with a specific size and a specific weight.  In the example shown on the above, you see that Physical Port 1 has 4 partitions:

• Partition 1 (red) = 2Gbps, running as an iSCSI HBA on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
• Partition 2 (orange) = 2Gbps, running as an FCoE HBA on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
• Partition 3 (green) = 1Gbps, running TOE on on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
• Partition 4 (blue) = 5Gbps, running as a Layer 2 NIC on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2

Each partition’s “Maximum Bandwidth” can be set to any increment of 100Mbps (or .1Gbps) up to 10000 Mbps or 10 Gbps.  Also, note, this is for send/transmit only.  The receive direction bandwidth is always 10 Gbps.

Furthermore, admins can configure the weighting of each partition to provide increased bandwidth presence when an application requires it.  In the example above, Physical Port 2 has the “Relative Bandwidth Weight” on all 4 partitions set for an equal weight at 25% – giving each port equal weight.  If, however VMkernel NIC 1 (red) needed to have more weight, or priority, over the other NICs, we could set the weight to 100% giving that port top priority.

If you are feeling really adventurous, you can oversubscribe a port.  This is accomplished by setting the 4 partitions of that single port to having a Maximum Bandwidth setting of more than 100%.  This allows each of the partitions to take as much bandwidth as allowed as their individual traffic flow needs change – based on the Relative Bandwidth Weight assigned.  Take a look at the following:

The example above shows each of the four partitions’ Maximum Bandwidth (shown in .1 increments so 10 = 1 Gbps)

• Partition 1 = 1 Gbps
• Partition 2 = 1 Gbps
• Partition 3 = 8 Gbps
• Partition 4 = 8 Gpbs

Total for all 4 partitions = 18 Gbps, which means the port is 80% (8 Gbps) oversubscribed.

Some additional rules to note from the NPAR User’s Manual:

• For Microsoft Windows Server, you can have the Ethernet Protocol enabled on all, some, or none of the four partitions on an individual port.
• For Linux OSs, the Ethernet protocol will always be enabled (even if disabled in Dell Unified Server Configuration screen).
• A maximum of two iSCSI Offload Protocols (HBA) can be enabled over any of the four available partitions of a single port. For simplicity, it is recommended to always using the first two partitions of a port for any offload protocols.
• For Microsoft Windows Server , the Ethernet protocol does not have to be enabled for the iSCSI offload protocol to be enabled and used on a specific partition.

For more information on the Network Partitioning capabilities of the Dell Network Daughter Card, check out the white paper at: Dell Broadcom NPAR White Paper

Kevin Houston is the founder of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 14 plus years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.    Kevin works for Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global 500 market.