HP Blade Servers Explained

General Overview

This page is designed to get you acquainted with the HP Blade server system and understand its basic features and what they do. For HP Blade server solutions please contact us and we will gladly help you.

A Blade server solution is a high density, high performance server environment that is installed into single or multiple chassis. The chassis includes all of the power and cooling necessary for these blade servers. The blade chassis also provides all connectivity internally and externally as well as full management of the blades inside the chassis. The end result? You will have a highly dense server environment that can manage power, cooling, connectivity and servers all in one place, whilst still being highly available and resilient, let me explain in more detail.

The HP Blade Chassis explained.

Hp have two chassis in their range, the C3000 and the C7000. The C3000 chassis will take up to 8 half height server blades or 4 full height server blades. The C7000 chassis will take up to 16 half height server blades or 8 full height server blades (32 if you use the 2x220c blades). There are a few different series of blade servers all of which have different uses and we will move onto this later on in this page.

The blade chassis as already mentioned provides all the power and cooling for the blade servers, however it does this intelligently. In order to be as energy efficient as possible these fans and PSU’s are constantly controlled and adjusted by a unit called the “Onboard Administrator Module”. This not only controls the amount of power needed and cooling required to optimize the performance of all the blades in the chassis, you use this to configure the blades as well via the management utility, ILO and KVM, for ultimate resiliency you can have up to two of these administrator modules in case one was to fail.

On the rear of the Chassis it has “Interconnect module slots”. These are for the connectivity from the blade servers to the outside of the chassis. There are a whole host of different interconnect modules such as Ethernet pass through, Ethernet switching, SAN fibre channel, virtual connect etc which we will go into and explain in more detail later on in this page.

The HP Blade servers explained

HP has many different Blade servers, some of which are more suited to certain environments.

These are split into half height and full height units, this relates to how many slots the blade consumes in the chassis, half height being one slot and full height two slots.

The Current range of half height blade servers are, The BL 2x220c, BL280, BL460/465 and the BL490/495, the only full height server blades now are the BL680 and BL685. All of these blades have different features and would be used in different scenarios etc, I will explain briefly what the main features of these servers are and what kind of environment you would use them in but each solution and environment is different so please contact us for more information if you need it.

BL 2x220c – This blade server is designed for highly dense server environments. The BL 2x220c contains two server nodes in the space of a single half height slot, this increases the total number of computing nodes (servers) in the chassis to 32 with up to 64 x Six core Intel Processors (192 cores) in just 10u of space.

BL280c – This blade server is a half height server, which is more for entry level environments or servers that don’t need so much in the way of features such as hot plug drives and 10gb Ethernet. Good example for this server to be used would be a Virtual management server for a small to mid sized environment.

BL460c/465c – This blade again is half height and by far the most popular amongst customers in the blade server range. The Blade now offers twin 10GB network cards as standard, large memory capacity (12 Dimm DDR 3 slots) hot plug hard drives and space for two mezzanine cards (Expansion options such as additional NIC’s etc) The blade comes in two flavours, Intel (BL460) and AMD (BL465); uses for this blade span many different scenarios.

BL490 – Another Half height server which is similar to the BL460, however the BL490 is more focused on the Mid - Enterprise sized Virtualisation solutions, having 18 Dimms slots and only options for internal high I/O Solid state hard drives these develop a perfect platform for consolidating or creating new virtual environments.

BL680/685c – If “performance per server” is the main requirement then the BL68x series is the one to use. These blades are the only full height blades in the range and take up two half height slots in the blade chassis (Max 8 blades per C7000 or 4 blades for a C3000). The server boasts up to 4 physical processors using Intel 7xxx series processors in the BL680 and AMD’s 61xx series processors in the BL685c. The server can take up to 512GB of ram (example used BL685c G7) and two hot plug hard drives.

The Basics of HP Blade chassis Interconnects and Mezzanine cards explained

As with all HP blade servers there are no ports on the back of the physical blades. So in order to connect these blades to the “outside world” you must have interconnect modules installed into the back of the Chassis.

HP has a wide range of different interconnects that they use with the blade enclosures, which offer all types of connectivity depending on what environment the blade system is in. Now from here on the information around these interconnects get quite in depth so its best to talk to us with regards to your particular solution requirements and we can explain these options in more detail.

These Interconnect Modules are also complemented by a wide range of Mezzanine cards. Now in case you are wondering what a Mezzanine card is, it is an expansion option within a blade server, kind of like a PCI slot in a normal Server. There are many Mezzanine options for such as additional Ethernet ports on the blades and fibre channel connectivity etc.

It’s worth noting that when you install a Mezzanine card into a blade server you need to make sure you install the corresponding Interconnect module. Again this is where it gets quite in depth and a conversation around your particular solution would be best.

I know this is a very brief introduction to blades, so if you are in need of more information or want any part expanding on then please do not hesitate to contact me.