Archive for blades
May 14, 2008 at 5:15 pm · Filed under blades, rackmounts
I got an email form Jenny asking if she needed to power down a hard drive that has failed before swapping it, to prevent any data loss. I’ve posted the reply:
Hi Jenny,
Basically is your server has reported a failed hard drive (orange light) or the agents have failed the drive it should be safe to remove and plug in your replacement drive. A few things to check:
- Check the drive is the same size and model type
- Check the drive is the same firmware - sometimes the agents might fail to rebuild the drive if the firmware is out of date (depends on the server manufacturer)
- Ensure you have a valid backup before carrying out any work on the server - as ever if you have any questions contact your support vendor/team.
The actions to replace failed hard drive would be:
- Check event logs for errors/agents for any issues
- Remove failed hard drive, pulling the lever that unplugs the drive slowly
- Plug in replacement hard drive and watch for lights on the drive to come online - on the HP servers, the disk light in the middle flashes as the drive rebuilds the array.
- Wait 5 mins or so and check the event logs for any erorrs, then check the agents, IBM Director, HP Insight Manager or Dell tools to see the rebuild status.
May 14, 2008 at 5:26 am · Filed under Bladesystems_insight_conference, blades, rackmounts
http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com and http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/hardware/idataplex/index.html
I saw iDataPlex for the first time today and spoke with some of the guys at the IBM stand at BladeSystems Insight. I do love the concept.
That I can buy one rack and then add the modular components I need, is very interesting andideal for HPC or web infrastructure. I could have an array of shared storage for the individual servers storage (os/data) and then rack the number of systems that I need. I got to see one of the server modules, very very cool. Check out the IBM video.
May 14, 2008 at 5:05 am · Filed under blades
http://www.colfax-intl.com/jlrid/SpotLight.asp?IT=0&RID=121
Colfax CX6000 Workgroup Cluster (WC) built on Intel® Multi-Flex Technology is an affordable, simple, and fully integrated supercomputer-in-a-box. Colfax CX6000 WC puts the power of high-performance computing (HPC) in the hands of individuals and workgroups of engineers, scientists, financial, and creative professionals, without the complexity and expense of an enterprise-level cluster system.
I saw one of these for the first time and spoke with a few guys at the Colfax stand at BladeSystems Insight, it looked quite cool. I like the concept of shared storage which I can then allocate to the servers as I see fit, so if the server has a hardware fault you can point the storage to another server.
May 13, 2008 at 11:54 pm · Filed under Grid, blades
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/24180.wss
ARMONK, NY - 13 May 2008: Driven by growing commercial need in areas such as financial services, digital media creation and medical imaging, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today expanded its High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities for businesses with the introduction of the IBM® BladeCenter® QS22 — a new, economical supercomputing technology inspired by advanced scientific research facilities.
The heart of the QS22 is a new processor compliant with the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) Architecture, originally developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba to provide the computing power for cutting-edge gaming applications. And for the most challenging arithmetic operations, this new processor, the IBM PowerXCell™ 8i, offers five-times the speed of the original Cell/B.E. processor.
This does sound cool. I remain a big fan of the Cell/B.E platform, any innovation of the platform has to be a good thing for the consumer in terms of choice and the blade platform. The extra memory support sounds very cool and should provide further opportunities/uses for those memory intensive HPC applications.
May 13, 2008 at 9:38 pm · Filed under blades
http://ideasint.eval.com/mblades/
This Collaborative Product Evaluation compares the functional capabilities of two leading blade server platforms targeting the requirements of midsize environments, such as small and medium businesses (SMB) and branch offices. The studied products include:
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IBM BladeCenter S, IBM’s first blade server chassis built specifically for the office and distributed enterprise environment |
The chart above shows summary ratings for the evaluated products, based on an average of their ratings in the five key functional areas below.
Check out this comparison of the IBM and HP Blade servers, it’s always good to read comparison reports/studies, was an interesting read, do check it out.
May 13, 2008 at 7:28 pm · Filed under How IT works, blades, rackmounts
http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/computing/2008/0805080805.asp?
A=SBC&S=Servers%20and%20Server-Based%20Computing&O=FPIN
[ Munich, 8 May 2008 ] - Extending its innovative FlexFrame Infrastructure to industry-standard PRIMERGY servers, Fujitsu Siemens Computers today delivers ServerView PAN ManagerT: a centralised, automated IT platform which enables systems to be dynamically adjusted, guaranteeing that they always deliver optimum performance.
The revolutionary IT architecture FlexFrame Infrastructure uses a virtualised, application-independent platform with high availability features designed to support both physical and virtual resources.
First featured in PRIMERGY BladeFrameR servers, ServerView PAN Manager powered by EgeneraR is at the heart of FlexFrame Infrastructure. Starting with the BX600, Fujitsu Siemens Computers is now extending the operational principle of PRIMERGY BladeFrame to its Blade Server line, leveraging ServerView PAN Manager software.
Very cool, anything Fujitsu can do to improve their blade platform has to be a good thing for Fujitsu, and the end user.
May 13, 2008 at 6:24 pm · Filed under blades, rackmounts
http://channel.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=13232
AMD had launched some new server processors with performance-per-watt as their key feature.
They are quad-core and come with the suffix HE to denote Highly Efficient. They are available in both the 2300 and 8300 Series for two, four and eight-way rack servers and blades.
“Our new Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE processors were designed to help datacenter managers who see power consumption and virtualization as the keys to solving their overall performance equation,” said Randy Allen, corporate VP and GM, server and workstation division at AMD.
“These new processors which feature AMD’s advanced power management and virtualization innovations offer a compelling platform for power-conscious datacenter managers who are changing the way they think about performance.”
Very cool, I’ll need to take a look at these processors and find out more.
May 13, 2008 at 6:09 pm · Filed under blades
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/
neterion-joins-hp-bladesystem-solution-builder-program,390645.shtml
CUPERTINO, CA — 05/13/08 — Neterion, Inc., the industry leader in 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) adapters for server and storage environments, today announced that it has joined the HP BladeSystem Solution Builder Program, a broad community of IT providers dedicated to helping customers of all sizes build and deploy innovative solutions on HP BladeSystem architecture.
Joining the Solution Builder Program demonstrates Neterion’s further commitment to helping develop and accelerate the deployment of 10 GbE for the blade marketplace with industry-leading networking and virtualization adapters.
Very cool, bringing more choice to the HP BladeSystem program brings more choice to the user, to find the right combination of components for your business which has to be a good thing.
May 13, 2008 at 5:24 pm · Filed under Other things, blades
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=854931h
SANTA CLARA, CA–(Marketwire - May 12, 2008) - BLADE Network Technologies, Inc., the industry leader in network virtualization for servers and storage, announced that GameVee.com, formerly GeeVee.com, is operating its new Web 2.0 user-submitted game-play video community using IBM BladeCenter equipped with BLADE’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches. On GameVee.com, the fastest-growing game-play video sharing website, users can upload their own game-play videos and share them with other gamers around the world. Using a large set of Web 2.0 features, they share, promote, communicate and network around their videos.
“Hosting quality videos can be difficult and very stressful on our underlying network infrastructure, but BLADE 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches ensure we’ll have ample bandwidth for our ‘bloaty’ video content,” said 20-year-old Jason Bradicich, Founder and CCO of GameVee.com. “When someone is staring at their screen, a matter of seconds makes a huge difference in their experience of GameVee.com. That’s where BLADE’s switches ensure that we can get top performance from IBM BladeCenter and our custom LAMP — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — open source software environment. Building a video hosting site completely from scratch is not for the faint of heart, but we have a great team of developers and BLADE’s service has been superior, which is vital because any problems are magnified by the fact that GameVee.com’s technology is so cutting edge.”
Very cool, the need to scale up the infrastructure as more and more content, new media and rich media come online (like BBC’s iPlayer etc), continues, whether we talk 10GB Ethernet for content delivery, for virtualization network capacity etc or hpc applications will depend on your business, your constraints.
May 13, 2008 at 3:47 am · Filed under Other things, blades
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=854892
Blade.org Technology Symposium will convene Blade.org member companies, end users and stakeholders to explore the top seven trends that are shaping the future of blade server-powered data centers: virtualization, dynamic IT, power and cooling, security, networking, storage, and microprocessing and memory. The first-annual symposium will feature guidance on where technology is headed from technical executives and senior technologists at APC, BLADE Network Technologies, Brocade, Devon IT, Emulex, IBM, Intel, NetApp, NetXen, QLogic, VirtenSys and VMware as well as a panel of visionary end user adopters of advanced data center and blade server technologies.
Very cool, it will be interesting to hear what the trends are, the more we discuss them, the more opportunities and possibilites can be developed - what works for me at bank or enterprise A, might be the complete opposite in a small business.
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