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Does the blade server live up to its hype?
Let's face it - marketing hype surrounding new product offerings has lost its appeal. Most techies realize their jobs are to solve problems, not be the first to adopt a nifty gizmo into their IT infrastructures. So let's lose the hype and consider the basic benefits that server blade vendors pitch - smaller size, easier management and fewer cables. If these expectations are met and performance and usability don't suffer, server blade systems could be valuable tools in IT data centers.
We looked at two server blade offerings from HP - the heavy-duty BL p-Class and the lower-end BL e-Class servers.The p-Class blade system scored a 4.3, based on its great management and serviceability features, plus strong performance.The e-Class scored a 3.7, but we felt that HP cut some corners with the e-Class features.
In the HP blade system, each blade is a stand-alone server with its own processors, memory and hard drive(s). The blades connect to the chassis backplane for power and network connections (and, for the e-Class, chassis-oriented management).
The p-Class
The p-Class blade server, designed for compute-heavy application such as data
base or dynamic Web applications, consists of a 6U-high (9U if you count the power supply unit) chassis that holds a maximum of eight two-processor blades.
HP also has a four-processor blade option that takes up two of the eight slots, for a maximum of 20 processors. Ours shipped with two dual-processor blades.The G1 version had two 1.4-GHz Pentium III processors and ran Windows 2000; the G2 had two 2.8-GHz Xeon processors and ran Linux.
On performance, the p-Class scored well (4 out of 5).The number of compute-heavy Secure Sockets Layer and file I/O-heavy non-SSLWeb transactions were expected from the amount of computing power in the blades. Our file and computational performance tests showed good scalability between processor types.
The larger file-size tests showed that both blade types have an 89M bit/sec network performance limit, while their network interface cards (NIC) are configured for 100M bit/sec full duplex operation.This limit is expected, considering the amount of I/O and TCP operation the blade must service.
The p-Class earned a high mark for features and flexibility, having the necessary features needed for most...