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Supermicro New Zealand
Talk of the Town: 4-in-1 Scheme
31 August 2009
Blade Servers are meant to provide an economy of scale in terms of hardware capital cost, installation space and centralized management. The concept is fine but not many small to medium sized businesses want or need to pay for Blade Servers as they may be overkill. We have now come up with a modified concept- "economy of scale on a small scale". The words may indicate some contradiction as an "economy of scale" can be gained only with "scale". The smallest scale is of course 2. Do we get any economy of scale from a blade server with 2 blades? The answer is no. Similarly the answer is no for 3 or 4 as far as a blade server is concerned.
What type of economy do we want to gain from scale? The first one is obviously cost. The second one is space. The third one, system management. The fourth is electricity consumption. The sequence may be different for different people but essentially we shall address these 4 factors.
We are recommending the 2U Twin Squared which provides 4 systems. The 4 systems are independent and are not called blades (but nodes). Each system has its own Dual Socket processors, 12 DIMM slots for 48GB memory, 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 3 standard size SATA/SAS hard disks and hot swappable trays, and its own IPMI hardware with a dedicated NIC port. Each system is standalone and are self-sufficient systems.
As far as cost is concerned, the economy comes from the PSU, hard disk interfacing backplane and the chassis. These 3 components are shared by 4 systems. Based on the same processors (2x Xeon 5504) and memory installed (2x 2GB), this 2U Twin is about 3 times the cost of a 1U system and produce a saving of 25% per system.
In terms of cabinet space, the highest density in the market is 14 systems per 7U or 0.5U per blade. The 2U Twin Squared achieves 0.5U per system too.
Remote or centralized system management is provided through IPMI for individual systems. The console GUI can certainly be configured to include these 4 systems plus other systems.
The power supply is a single point of failure. Therefore we have upgraded the 2U Twin Squared to a hot Redundant PSU arrangement. Not only is the PSU is hot swappable; the 4 individual systems are also hot swappable. This means that maintenance work on one system will not affect the other 3 in service. We use an efficient Certified 80 PLUS Gold PSU. It achieves over 92% of efficiency at 50% load and over 88% at 100% load. Power Factor is over 90%.
These systems are powered by the Tylersburg chipset (Intel 5520) and the Southbridge is ICH10R supporting Host RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 for Windows and 0, 1, 10 for Linux. There is also a provision for one Low Profile PCI Express 2.0 card. The onboard VGA is Matrox 200eW.
For mission critical installations, we recommend keeping the 4th system (or an extra) as a cold spare. This cold spare has identical hardware to the rest and can replace any failed hardware in a matter of minutes. For sure, we can also use this 4th system for non-mission critical testing at other times.
Please consider the merits of this innovative scheme and feel free to contact us for more information.
Editor
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Supermicro New Zealand
Managed by Compucon New Zealand
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