Technical white paper Technologies in HP ProLiant Gen8 c-Class server blades Table of contents Introduction 3 HP BladeSystem Infrastructure 3 HP ProLiant c-Class server blade architecture 4 HP c-Class enclosures 4 HP ProLiant Gen8 server blade hardware design 5 Processor technologies 12 Intel Xeon processors 12 AMD Opteron processors 13 Thermal technologies Thermal engineering 13 13 Memory technologies 14 HP SmartMemory 14 HP Advanced Memory Error Detection technology 15 I/O Interco
Management technologies 21 Server monitoring and management 21 Power monitoring and management 24 HP Insight Management 25 HP Smart Update system software management 27 Data security technology with the Trusted Platform Module 28 Conclusion 28 For more information 29 Call to action 29 2
Introduction HP ProLiant Gen8 servers and the HP BladeSystem infrastructure incorporate wire-once, cloud-ready technologies that maximize every hour, watt and dollar. By abstracting the servers from their uplinks, HP liberates administrators from traditional infrastructure constraints and simplifies management between networks and servers. This allows the creation of pools of network, storage, and compute resources. With wire-once technology you can add, move, or change servers in minutes.
with applications and virtualization that move your infrastructure into a cloud-based environment. You can do all this with the HP BladeSystem infrastructure as the foundation. We’ve engineered HP BladeSystem Infrastructure underlying technologies to help maximize every hour, watt, and dollar associated with your operation. This means that HP BladeSystem implementation is not a “rip and replace” proposition. Budget constraints and investment preservation are always a concern.
The c-Class enclosure’s System Insight Display (Figure 1) makes administrators more efficient. It lets you to set up a bare-metal enclosure for access. The display also allows you to perform routine administration functions without a crash-cart of other equipment attached to the enclosure. Figure 1. You can find out more about HP c-Class enclosures at http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/enclosures/c-class/index.
Half-height HP ProLiant Gen8 server blades Half-height ProLiant Gen8 server blades provide up to two processors, twelve to sixteen DIMM slots, up to two hot-plug drives, one FlexibleLOM slot, and up to two mezzanine slots. Optional mezzanine cards provide a wide variety of different I/O fabric connectivity to the interconnect bays. The FlexibleLOM features up to two 10 Gb FlexFabric ports (Figure 2). Figure 2.
Full-height ProLiant Gen8 server blades Full-height ProLiant Gen8 server blades (Figure 3) provide up to 4 processors, and provide twice as much I/O bandwidth to the interconnect modules as the half-height server blades. Figure 3. The full-height ProLiant Gen8 server blade platform, represented by the ProLiant BL660c, is a new density-optimized offering with 4P performance and features in a single-wide, full-height form factor.
HP Smart Socket Guide The HP Smart Socket Guide (Figure 4) provides ease and simplicity of processor installation or upgrade. You get quick, precise processor installation and lower risk of downtime due to improper installation or replacement. Other non-HP systems use only a clamping mechanism prone to socket damage due do mishandling or poor processor placement. The HP Smart Socket Guide is a precision guidance mechanism that ensures the processor is correctly keyed and placed within the socket. Figure 4.
HP Smart Drive hot-plug drive carrier The ProLiant Gen8 Smart Drive hot-plug drive carrier (Figure 5) includes several improvements that are consistent throughout the c-Class server blade family. Figure 5.
network requirements could change in the future, forcing you to abandon system board components (that will continue to draw power) and add a card. FlexibleLOM technology for HP ProLiant Gen8 server blades provide customers with network adapter flexibility including choice of technology, speed, and number of ports (model dependent). The ProLiant Gen8 FlexibleLOMs install as a daughter card on the server blade board similar to a mezzanine card (Figure 6). Figure 6.
Mezzanine expansion slots ProLiant Gen8 server blades feature two or three PCIe 3.0 mezzanine expansion slots up to x16 bandwidth (PCIe 2.0 in the ProLiant BL465c server blade). These expansion slots provide the highest performing I/O cards now and into the future (Figure 7). Figure 7: HP Power Regulator for ProLiant HP Power Regulator for ProLiant is a hardware feature that enables ProLiant servers to dynamically control performance states (p-states) of the system processors.
Processor technologies HP ProLiant Gen8 c-Class server blades use multi-core technologies from Intel and AMD (shown in Table 1). A multi-core processor has two or more separate execution cores on one or more physical dies so that it can perform more work within a given clock cycle. To take advantage of multi-core processing, software must be multi-threaded to distribute the work across multiple execution cores.
AMD Opteron processors HP ProLiant Gen8 server blades based on AMD processors use up to two Multi-Core AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors with 4, 8, 12, or 16 cores per processor with PCIe 2.0 using the AMD SR5690 and SP5100 chipsets. The building block of 8-core Opteron 6200 series processors is the Bulldozer module. The Bulldozer module executes two parallel threads using two 128-bit integer cores. Each core has four pipelines and a dedicated integer, but share the fetch/decode stage and the L2 cache.
Precise ducting on ProLiant c-Class server blades manages airflow and temperature based on the unique thermal requirements of all the critical components. The airflow is tightly ducted to ensure that no air bypasses the server blade and to obtain the most thermal work from the least amount of air moved. Ducting reduces the amount of required airflow, which in turn reduces the power draw of fans. The lower airflow requirement has the added benefit of optimizing the available data center cooling capacity.
You can read more about HP SmartMemory at http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/docs/4AA39210ENW.pdf HP Advanced Memory Error Detection technology Uncorrectable memory errors can cause applications and operating systems to crash, so they are costly in terms of downtime and repairs. The best way to prevent unnecessary DIMM replacements is to filter out superfluous errors and identify critical errors that can lead to a shutdown.
pair to transmit data at the signaling rate in both directions simultaneously. ProLiant Gen8 server blades support PCIe 3.0 slots (PCIe 2.0 in the BL465c), which have a signaling rate of 2.5 Gb/s per direction per lane. After accounting for 20 percent serializing/deserializing encoding overhead, the resulting effective maximum bandwidth is 2 Gb/s (250 MB/s) per direction per lane. Therefore, a x4 link with 4 send and receive pairs has an effective bandwidth of 2 GB/s.
TOE is included on integrated Multifunction Gigabit Ethernet adapters and optional multifunction mezzanine cards. It is supported on Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 when the Scalable Networking Pack is installed. With the delivery of Windows Server 2008, the TCP/IP Offload Chimney that shipped in the Scalable Networking Pack is included as part of the latest Windows operating system.
with iSCSI and LAN. It provides Virtual Connect wire-once connection management that streamlines processes, allowing you to implement server changes in a matter of minutes. Virtual Connect direct-attach Fibre Channel Using HP Flat SAN technology Fibre Channel is the storage fabric of choice for most enterprise IT infrastructures. Until now, Fibre Channel required an intermediate SAN fabric to create your storage solution.
workloads. The Gen8 Smart Array controller with SSDs is 60 times faster than the previous generation controller with traditional hard drives. When you combine Gen8 Smart Array controller and SSD performance with PCIe 2.0 support, bandwidth increases more than 85%. ProLiant Gen8 servers use HP Smart Array P-Series Controllers. The servers also accommodate HP I/O accelerators, which reduce write latencies and increase the overall load capability of each server.
configurations, which provides the highest level of fault tolerance offered by Smart Array. ADM is over 1000 times more reliable than two-drive mirroring. ADM generates three copies of the data protecting you from two drive failures, and you continue to get good performance. HP SmartCache HP SmartCache utilizes SSDs for caching to accelerate workload performance. The solution uses HP Smart Analytics technology to intelligently assign frequently accessed “hot data” to high-performance SSD drives.
Solid state drives HP server solid state drives (SSD) were introduced in late 2008 for use in specific HP BladeSystem environments. SSDs connect to the host system using the same protocols as disk drives, but they store and retrieve file data in flash memory arrays rather than on spinning media. SSDs have much lower latencies than traditional hard drives. They also power up quickly. They also achieve high random-read performance.
HP BladeSystem Onboard Administrator The brain of the BladeSystem c-Class enclosure is the Onboard Administrator (OA) module located in the enclosure.
HP Agentless Management HP Agentless Management is base hardware monitoring and alerting capability without the complexity of OS-based agents. And it’s available the moment you connect a power cord and Ethernet cable to the server. HP Agentless Management Service is an optional add-on utility that provides OS configuration data and additional subsystem coverage.
For specific OS support, see the HP Intelligent Provisioning Release Notes. For more information on Intelligent Provisioning software, see the HP website (www.hp.com/go/intelligentprovisioning). Power monitoring and management We enhanced our monitoring and management tools for ProLiant Gen8 servers. These tools include Thermal Logic, HP Systems Insight Manager 7.0 and HP Insight Control Power Management software.
For a more detailed description of these technologies, read “HP power and cooling technologies for the data center.” You can find it at http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02018535/c02018535.pdf. You can find more information about HP Thermal Logic technologies on the HP website: www.hp.com/go/thermallogic. Power Management Tools We enhanced Insight Control Power Management software for ProLiant Gen8 server blades.
Integrated with HP Insight Remote Support, HP SIM also provides contracts and warranty management, and automates remote support. For previous-generation servers, the Version Control Agent (VCA) was responsible for determining whether the server is out of date with its assigned baseline. A baseline is a set of software and firmware that has been tested to work together on a particular server. That required a VCA on every server. On ProLiant Gen8 servers running HP SIM 7.
available through the VMware vCenter Server console, enabling comprehensive monitoring, remote control, and power optimization directly from the vCenter console. HP Insight Control includes one year of 24 x 7 HP Software Technical Support and Update Service ensuring rapid access to HP support staff and proactive delivery of software updates. For more information about this service, please visit: www.hp.com/go/insight.
inventory, and scheduling of the correct components to be downloaded. After the update, HP SUM removes all software used during the update and creates a log of everything that occurred. HP SUM offers several advantages: It improves the efficiency of ProLiant servers and HP BladeSystem enclosure updates by preloading only what is needed and enabling online update components.
For more information Visit the URLs listed below if you need additional information. Resource description Web address HP ProLiant and BladeSystem Whitepapers http://www.hp.com/servers/technology HP BladeSystem www.hp.com/go/blades HP iLO Management Engine technologies Technology brief h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c03207602/c 03207602.pdf HP Systems Insight Manager 7.0 and HP Agentless Management overview h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c03306157/c 03306157.
