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The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System is poised to bring blade efficiencies to new applications
It is no secret that the blade server market has witnessed dramatic growth. As businesses struggle to increase processing power within existing data center space, blades have witnessed a growing share of server markets — especially in the Web and light-application tiers. Aside from the anecdotal evidence, IDC estimates1 that blade servers will grow at a cumulative rate of 42.7 percent between 2006 and 2010 — achieving a 25 percent share of the entire market by that time frame.
Still, despite the impressive figures, today's blades are largely relegated to niche applications within the data center. Due to design compromises that curtail processing power, I/O throughput, and on-board memory, blades are currently limited in deployment options and best suited for the Web and light-application tiers. With the introduction of revolutionary new modular technology, Sun has broken through this barrier into areas previously dominated by rackmount servers, including heavy application and database serving.
The Growing Appeal of Blades and the Challenges They Face
The recent success of blades is no accident. As CIOs and IT managers wrestle with shrinking budgets and rising costs, they are considering adding or replacing rackmount or blade systems in their data centers because existing server technology is not aligning with their business strategies. The overall challenges IT organizations are facing require:
- More Performance: Eliminate bottlenecks and reduce downtime
- Greater Efficiency: More performance with lower power and cooling costs and increased compute density
- Enhanced System Management: Simplified integration, management and coexistence within existing infrastructure
- Increased Longevity: Scale and grow without disruption
These requirements surpass the capabilities of today's blades, which were designed to meet the demands of smaller applications and Web services for organizations that prefer to scale out their edge infrastructure by adding more blades. When it comes to larger and more critical applications, as well as database workloads, these same enterprises have typically favored a scaling up approach, which aims to respond to growing capacity needs by deploying more powerful — as well as more space- and power-consuming — rackmount servers.
With the advent of more powerful multi-core processors, however, these distinctions are beginning to break down. As multi-core processors gain popularity, blade server compute performance can begin to approach — and even exceed in certain instances — the levels found in traditionally more powerful rackmount servers. Going forward, blade servers will be able to handle the workloads associated with large enterprise applications, at least from a CPU perspective.
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As multi-core processors gain popularity, blade server compute performance can begin to approach — and even exceed in certain instances — the levels found in traditionally more powerful rackmount servers.
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But processing power is not enough to make blade servers enterprise ready. With more CPU cycles, I/O throughput and network connectivity requirements take on added importance. In other words, the backplane bandwidth of blades must be increased in order to avoid system bottlenecks. Plus, in-chassis I/O aggregation needs to support different interconnect fabrics, including 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand.
Not only does growing processing power change I/O requirements, it also creates a growing need for power efficiency. Simply put, greater compute density creates more heat and calls for more efficient cooling. Blade vendors need to respond by building power cooling efficiencies into the chassis design, without compromising redundancy or reliability.
Finally, today's blades come with an initial deployment obstacle. In order to enjoy the benefits of today's blades, enterprises are forced to re-architect an IT environment to accommodate the new infrastructure. Data center processes, systems management, and network topologies all need to be adjusted to accommodate today's blades within an existing rackmount server environment. For blades to assume more than a niche role, they need be deployed and managed in a manner identical to all of the other servers in the environment.
Introducing the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System
The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System is the only system designed specifically for high-end x86 computing that delivers the best of both worlds — the performance, price, and flexibility of the top-of-the-line rackmount servers and the serviceability and efficiency of blade servers.
The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System delivers on the advantages of blades while outperforming many of today's rackmount servers. As demonstrated by world record performance benchmarks2, the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System is specifically designed to offer performance and capacity exceeding today's rackmount servers and to provide long-term longevity through 2010 and beyond.
Built to handle the intense demands of mission-critical application and database workloads, the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System heralds new opportunities for the blade and rackmount server markets. It is the only blade system in the marketplace comprised of components that are completely modular for ease of configuration, externally accessible for rapid serviceability, and hot-pluggable for scalability and growth without disruption.
The server modules contain four AMD Opteron 800 series dual core processors (2.0, 2.2, or 2.6 GHz), resulting in eight high performance cores with up to 64GB of memory. Plus, each server module contains up to two hot-swappable SAS or SATA drives. There are no fans, PSUs, or riser cards on the server modules. Instead, each server module has unique I/O that is connected through a PCI Express midplane to two industry standard PCI Express ExpressModules that allow per-server module I/O capabilities, as well as to four aggregate I/O modules (called Network Express Modules).
The Network Express Modules are available in multiple types: Ethernet, Fibre Channel and/or InfiniBand. The combination of the I/O modules provides for up to 192Gbps per server module — 2 to 20 times of I/O performance compared to other four-socket rackmount and blade servers. The server modules, which are equivalent to rackmount servers, also utilize redundant power and cooling provided by the chassis for greater energy efficiency.
High Bandwidth with PCI Express Architecture
It's worth taking a moment to expound on the advantages of the PCI Express architecture. Built to accommodate ever more powerful multi-core processors, the Sun Blade 8000 chassis is designed to reach bandwidths of 2Tbps across 10 server modules with 80 processing cores. This impressive I/O throughput is accomplished with PCI Express links from the server modules, across the midplane, and to networking modules in the back of the chassis.
Not only does the PCI Express architecture deliver the I/O throughput necessary to power enterprise applications, it also offers unrivaled I/O flexibility. The PCI Express cards plug into the back of the chassis, meaning the server modules themselves have no I/O and are not tied to any particular I/O fabric (Ethernet, Fibre Channel, or InifiniBand).
In other words, with the Sun Blade 8000, it is possible to take a server module from one chassis and plug it into another regardless of the I/O fabric used, and also possible to have a mixed fabric environment with server module-specific I/O networking. Plus, the PCI Express ExpressModules are hot-pluggable and 100 percent industry standard, which means no vendor lock-in.
The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System also resolves other design limitations associated with today's blades. Specifically, the server modules are architecturally neutral, which means that customers can maintain consistent management protocols, processes, and network topologies across the entire server environment. In fact, the Sun Blade 8000 is the only blade system that doesn't require new or custom systems management tools, proprietary network switching, or changes to existing network management policies.
This eliminates the need to re-engineer a management or network infrastructure, which reduces the complexity and risk in deployment and provides significant expense savings in training, consulting, switch module and software licensing costs. And, with its own onboard Sun ILOM Service Processor, each server module is managed the same way as a standalone rack optimized server.
Additionally, the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System helps solve the power and cooling issues raised by high-density compute environments. With power and cooling efficiencies built into the chassis, the Sun Blade 8000 Modular Systems are up to 62 percent3 more energy-efficient than comparable rackmount and blade servers. That's because the Sun Blade 8000 chassis design enables larger and more efficient power supplies, as well as larger and fewer fans, both of which help lower the cost of operation. In the end, each individual server module consumes merely 500 to 600 watts of power depending on the configuration.
Key Application Areas for the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System
The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System combines immense x64 processing power and throughput, excellent availability, and product life longevity. As a result, it can and will be used widely as a general-purpose server. However, there are also several key application areas in which it can dramatically improve performance and operations.
Consolidation and Virtualization
Using consolidation and virtualization strategies, many enterprises plan to replace hundreds or thousands of under-utilized servers with fewer, more powerful systems to reduce power, cooling, and space costs. But consolidation and virtualization both require extensive processing power and memory, excellent I/O, and extremely high availability.
The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System leads its market in all these areas, and enables customers to realize the three major benefits of consolidation:
- Cost reductions through software licensing, system management, acquisition, and increased server utilization
- The delivery of predictable service levels
- Improvements in manageability by reducing complexity, promoting standardization, and creating infrastructure efficiencies
The Sun Blade 8000 offers 80 cores of computing in a single chassis — or 160 cores of computing in a single rack — which is double the density with up to 40 percent lower power requirements when compared to a comparable four-socket rackmount server. In other words, it offers a tremendous amount of compute power in a small amount of space.
In fact, it offers so much power that organizations might be tempted to eschew the Sun Blade 8000 for Web and light application-tier use — which would be a terrible mistake. That's where virtualization technology comes into place. Technologies like Solaris Containers, VMware ESX Server, and others can accelerate consolidation while providing greater hardware utilization.
This technology enables operating systems and applications to run independently on the same shared physical server. The net result is that you will have the capability to consolidate hundreds of older x86 boxes onto a single Sun Blade 8000 Modular System, thereby realizing considerable savings.
The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System is ideally designed for virtualization and consolidation. It offers the extensive processing power and memory, excellent I/O, and extremely high availability that virtualization demands. Plus, because it is a blade system, the form factor makes it much easier to move around resources to where they are needed. When coupled with virtualization technologies, Sun Blade 8000 Modular System is an ideal solution for dynamic, flexible computing, as well as simplified systems management.
High Performance Computing
The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System is a perfect platform for deploying large-scale HPC clusters in MCAE, oil and gas, life sciences, financial services, government research and education, and classified defense. Its modular architecture is well suited for applications needing eight-way SMP nodes as building blocks for clusters (862 GFLOPS per rack), as well as applications that require high performance, reliability, throughput, and future in-place expandability.
Databases and Enterprise-Class Applications
The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System is also an ideal platform for deploying large-scale Oracle 10g RAC clusters. Enterprises that have attempted to use current generation blades for large-scale Oracle 10g RAC (Real Application Cluster) for mission-critical production environments have achieved mixed results because of limited I/O bandwidth and flexibility. Faster CPUs, additional memory density, and improved I/O bandwidth enable high throughput applications — such as business intelligence, data warehouse, business processing, databases, and Oracle 10g grids — to run smoothly on the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System.
The New General-Purpose Compute Platform
Ultimately, the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System offers the best of all worlds. The Sun Blade 8000 delivers the benefits of blade servers, including ease of serviceability, finely grained scalability, low deployment costs, and power efficiency.
Plus, it provides the advantages of today's rackmount servers, such as impressive compute power, high I/O throughput, I/O flexibility, on-board memory, and simplified management. If a customer is deploying multiple servers there is no reason not to use the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System as the general-purpose compute platform. Ultimately, the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System is poised to bring the benefits of consolidation to every tier in the data center.
1 Modular Computing Leverages Blade Server Capabilities, IDC, June 2006
2 http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/8000/benchmarks.jsp
3 Power consumption/cooling vs IBM HS40 with 16GB memory, 4 sockets
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