HPE BladeSystem

HP c7000 Bladesystem enclosure with 16 server baldes installed

BladeSystem is a brand name used by Hewlett Packard for blade server machines, that was introduced in October 2004.

Blades are a modern form of server technology that have a more efficient design than conventional servers, which cuts down on the excess components that are usually found in regular servers and makes room for the implementation of components that will help with the specified needs. This helps create more efficient use of physical space and energy.

Blades are packaged ultra-high density components that can be used toward a variety of services. The common uses include servers, storage of data, and communication interfaces. Blades are racked inside blade enclosures, which supply them with power, cooling and networking. BladeSystems have seen a high demand due to their high specialization, and because they have greatly increased the speed of programs and the capacity of data storage in a much smaller space compared to conventional server setups.

Characteristics

Before the introduction of blade servers and specifically the BladeSystem, servers often took up a lot of space. The BladeSystem allows to build a high density system, up to 128 servers in each rack.

Components

Enclosures

HP c7000 enclosure

Currently HP offers 2 types of enclosures in its Bladesystem lineup

c7000

HP c7000 enclosure was announced in June 2006. Updated version of the enclosure called c7000 Platinum was announced in February 2013. It features location discovery services, thermal discovery services and redesigned backplane. The new backplane increased aggregate bandwidth 40% from 5 to 7 Tb/sec to allow use newest high-speed interconnect modules (such as 16Gb/s FC, 56Gb/s FDR InfiniBand and 40Gb/s Ethernet). Also the new Platinum Plus rating power supplies were announced with higher efficiency than previous Gold Plus rating power supplies .

All versions of the enclosure occupy 10 rack units and can accommodate up to 16 half-height blade servers. It includes space for 6 power supplies (single-phase, three-phase or a -48V DC), 10 cooling fans, 8 interconnect modules (that allows for up to 4 redundant interconnect fabrics)

c3000

HP c3000 enclosure was announced in August 2007. Updated version of the enclosure called c3000 Platinum was announced in February 2013

All versions of the enclosure occupy 6 rack units or can be used as a standalone unit (with optional tower conversion kit) It can accommodate up to 8 half-height blade servers. It includes space for 6 power supplies (single-phase, or a -48V DC), 6 cooling fans, 4 interconnect modules

Server blades

HP offers general-purpose Proliant server blades as well as Integrity (based on Intel Itanium CPU) and specialized Proliant aimed at workstation virtualization. Servers can use half-height/full-height and single-wide/double-wide formfactors. Apart from built-in Ethernet network adapters, optional mezzanine cards can be installed to further increase connectivity options.

In current generation (Gen8) half-height Proliant blade servers with up to 2 CPU and full-height 4 CPU servers are available.

Storage

Storage options include:

• Internal server HDD's (usually 2 to 4 with hot-swap capabality)
• Internal USB, SD or microSD slot (can be used for installing hypervisor)
• Connecting to external SAN via FC, SAS or iSCSI mezzanine card
• Storage blade (with large number of internal HDD's)
• Tape blade (half-height blade unit hosting LTO tape drive and designed to connect to some blade server)