Okay, I've been unemployed for six months now, so maybe I'm out of touch with current computer technologies, but, despite the fact that I hate Compaq with a passion, this is really cool:

Compaq ProLiant BL e-Class

Anyone have any experience with these?

Anyone have any experience with these?

No experience with them. My first, knee-jerk, reaction, though, is that they look like a solution in search of a problem. Only compelling if you have a bunch of them (from the space efficiency standpoint) and no hot plug capabiliity. Clustering would seem to be the raison d'etre, yet there are specific disclaimers about a number of clustering technologies including MSFT, Novell, etc. due to lack of support of external storage.

Hmmm. I have no grudge against Compaq. Am I being too harsh? What am I missing?

How *is* the job hunt going??

The problem is that space in data centers is expensive. If you can cram 280 700MHz Pentium servers in one cabinet, that's a lot of savings in rental. In my mind, the problem it's a solution for is distributed computing. The backplane they run on seems to be quite wide. I have had a number of problems in the past where a correct solution is just to throw a lot of separate computing power at it. A solution like this could have come in handy. One of the solutions at the time was 30 4-CPU Sun E440Rs, each of which was 5U high, so that's a bunch of space (1.25U/CPU as opposed to 0.2U/CPU).

My grudge against Compaq lies in their awful non-server class products (laptops to desktops) and in the fact that they bought DEC/Digital and let it languish, to name just a few. Also, I once worked for a company that they invested in. They were going to sell us servers at a discount. When asked about installing Solaris (I think -- could have been Linux) on them, they responded by stating that it would void the hardware warranty. We ended up paying ``full'' price somewhere else, but were forced to use their lousy (read ``break-every-week'') laptops in public-facing arenas. (Only to have officials at those venues force us to cover the logos later on.) In addition, many of them broke in exactly the same way and, since they determined that it was a design defect, they refused to repair them under warranty.

The job hunt is going awfully. Thanks for asking!

Yes, they are quite nice. The gigabit switch option is a good feature to get, as it creates a reduction of 40 to 4 cables for network access.

The blades themselves use a very low voltage Intel CPU, low voltage chipset, and some other design tricks to keep the heat down and power requirements low.

280 of these in a single 42U rack are awesome looking. And as far as where they fit, they are being sold as basic servers (DHCP, static web, etc...) or as a Linux Beowolf cluster.

Though if you are impressed with these, wait until you see what is coming...

My grudge against Compaq lies in their awful non-server class products (laptops to desktops)

Agreed to some extent. Some of the Armada (and now Evo) laptops are decent. And the high end Deskpro's are also rather nice. Mostly due to seperate design companies then the Presario (eww) line.

and in the fact that they bought DEC/Digital and let it languish

Agreed on this one to some point. Compaq mainly bought Digital for their service department, and it helped to turn the support around. But the death of the Alpha sucks. By now it could have been refined to not only be a server chip, but also a laptop chip.

When asked about installing Solaris (I think -- could have been Linux) on them, they responded by stating that it would void the hardware warranty.

Odd, considering Solaris works and is certified on most of the Proliant servers, as is Linux. Compaq has quite a few projects over on Sourceforge.net as well.

Are you saying that the concept of "server blades" is cool, or are you saying that this specific model of server blade is cool? Blades have been around a while...

I'm saying that I've never seen ones this small before. Again, maybe I'm out of touch, but 20 CPUs in 3U (or 280 CPUs per cabinet) seems pretty dense to me.

The problem is that space in data centers is expensive. If you can cram 280 700MHz Pentium servers in one cabinet, that's a lot of savings in rental.

Shades of Cubix!!

I understand the economics, but I think I just wasn't doing the math adequately over 1U rack servers -- 280 is certainly a lot even as compared to 84 (42 duals) and I read with interest Drakino's following notes on low power consumption CPUs...

Okey-dokey, that's a lot of CPUs, and I'll just allow that there will be lots of clustering applications where their disclaimers don't apply. I remember reading about the rendering farm (Alphas, sorry!) that the GGI house built for Titanic -- 200+ CPUs. I suppose you could fit the whole farm in one 42U rack on these blades. OK....

Still, no hot plug and not storage-oriented, so more of a CPU-density thing...

Re: DEC. Yeah, too bad as I have some relatives in MA who have suffered the Compaq takeover. Will somebody point me to a takeover/acquisition where the acquiring company integrated the acquisition well, didn't piss off the staff of the acquisition, and really leveraged what they bought? (No, I'm not trying to make a statement about SonicBLUE!). It just seems that most acquisitions are reactive and defensive in nature and, well, ....suck.

Also having 280 CPUs in a cabinet yet only having 28 power cables (2 per enclosure, assuming you went with the redundant power supplies) is really nice. I've dealt with a full-up (or nearly so) cabinet of 1U machines and the power cord issue (not to mention supplying that much amperage) is a nightmare.

Plus, the built-in NICs, apparently attaching to the enclosure's backplane, is a good way to avoid an ethernet patch nightmare.

I'm not really sure what you mean by hot-plug, though? You want the enclosure to run as an SMP or NUMA machine and remove CPUs while running? You're going to pay a lot more for a multi-processor solution, and well more than that for being able to remove CPUs on the fly (not even sure if there's an Intel solution where you can do that at all).

Speaking of which, this always reminds me of when Microsoft claimed that the eBay failures were Sun's fault. My favorite (partial) rebuttal:

Microsoft says, "System boards that are hosting non-pageable kernel data structures cannot be removed from a domain without interrupting service. The Solaris operating system has to undertake a special "quiesce," or suspend, operation while the critical pages are migrated to another board." The very fact that you can migrate kernel memory off of a certain piece of hardware and swap it out is pretty incredible. It is also a feat that Windows NT cannot do under any circumstances. As a slashdot reader noted, "This is a bizarre attempt at deception akin to buy my car -- that brand sucks because you can't change the brake pads while it is speeding down the Interstate!"

(From http://www.solariscentral.com/news/commentary/ebay.shtml)

I have to agree on the hot plug comment here. These aren't processors, they are full computers on a small board, and they connect into a backplane only for power, RJ45 ports and a serial port to the integrated managment board. Show me a server that is completly hot plug. The Tandem based non stop systems have many hot plug components, but would fail if you pulled all their power. Same concept here.

And if you look closly, the removal buttons don't have the same color as all of Compaq's hot plug components. Probably a good idea, though I still see people trying it.

Oh, and most people will see one component as a single point of failure, the enclosure. Everything that needs to be is redundant (cooling, power, network), so there is little that can bring all the blades down at once. The "backplane" that all the blades plug into is only made of connectors and circuit board wiring. Absolutly no chips of any kind are on it, so the odds of it failing are huge compaired to the other components.

> they determined that it was a design defect, they refused
> to repair them under warranty

Isn't that the very reason there is a warranty in the first place?

Hey - maybe this is what I'm doing wrong in empeg support. If I followed the approach taken by such 'respected industry-leading companies' and tell all my customers to piss off when they have problems as well...

Nah.

I'm not really sure what you mean by hot-plug, though? You want the enclosure to run as an SMP or NUMA machine and remove CPUs while running?

I think my overall problem is that I went looking for the spec sheet on a dishwasher when in fact what I was reading was the spec sheet on a lawnmower. I wondered how the heck it would wash dishes.

On the hot-plug issue, I was really referring to pluggable drives (should have said that) and lack of hot-plug RAID-1 opportunity (well, each blade only has a single drive, so that makes sense).

Anyhow, there still seem to be limitations in how you would apply these, but I have a better sense of what problems they would solve (and the various cable messes they would avoid) thanks to your comments. Yes, you could put the entire rendering farm for that new Steven Seagal Titanic alternative-history flick in one rack footprint. Lack of disk mirroring probably doesn't matter in the overall context of an application like that. So, maybe these servers aren't for everybody, but they're probably for somebody.

That's a great snippet re: MSFT/Solaris.

Thanks,

Like I said to Tony Fabris in ICQ last night, there is probably a reason they made a BL family. I'd definitly expect more servers to come into this range soon, expecially the way their marketing department talks about it here:

http://www.compaq.com/products/servers/proliant-bl/e-class/description.html#advantage