Technologies in HP ProLiant G6 c-Class server blades with AMD Opteron™ processors

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Technologies in HP ProLiant G6 c-Class server

blades with AMD Opteron™ processors

technology brief

Abstract.............................................................................................................................................. 2

ProLiant c-Class server blade architecture................................................................................................ 2

Processor technologies ......................................................................................................................... 3

AMD Dual Dynamic Power Management™......................................................................................... 4

AMD Virtualization™ technology ....................................................................................................... 5

AMD Core Select............................................................................................................................. 5

Thermal Logic technologies ................................................................................................................... 5

Processor socket technology.................................................................................................................. 6

Memory technologies ........................................................................................................................... 6

I/O technologies ................................................................................................................................. 7

PCI Express technology..................................................................................................................... 7

HP Smart Array controllers ................................................................................................................ 8

Serial Attached SCSI technology........................................................................................................ 8

SAS and SATA Small Form Factor hard drives ..................................................................................... 9

Solid state drives.............................................................................................................................. 9

Optional mezzanine cards................................................................................................................ 9

Networking technologies .................................................................................................................. 9

TCP/IP Offload Engine................................................................................................................ 10

Receive-side Scaling (RSS) ........................................................................................................... 10

iSCSI Acceleration...................................................................................................................... 10

iSCSI boot for Linux .................................................................................................................... 10

Virtual Connect .......................................................................................................................... 11

Configuration and management technologies .......................................................................................12

BladeSystem Onboard Administrator................................................................................................ 12

ProLiant Onboard Administrator (Integrated Lights-Out 2) for ProLiant server blades ............................... 13

HP Insight Control suite ................................................................................................................... 13

Power management technologies......................................................................................................... 13

Power meter .................................................................................................................................. 14

HP Power Regulator for ProLiant....................................................................................................... 14

HP Dynamic Power Capping and HP Power Capping ........................................................................ 14

Data security technology with the Trusted Platform Module ..................................................................... 15

For more information.......................................................................................................................... 16

Call to action .................................................................................................................................... 16

Summary of content (16 pages)

PAGE 1
Technologies in HP ProLiant G6 c-Class server blades with AMD Opteron™ processors technology brief Abstract.............................................................................................................................................. 2 ProLiant c-Class server blade architecture................................................................................................ 2 Processor technologies ...............................................................................................
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Abstract This technology brief describes the architecture and the implementation of major technologies in HP ProLiant G6 c-Class Server Blades based on AMD Opteron™ processors. Much of the content of this paper is similar or identical to the content of a companion paper about the technologies in HP ProLiant G6 server blades based on Intel® Xeon® processors because many of the same technologies have been implemented in both.
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Figure 1. Example of a half-height HP BladeSystem server blade (an HP BL465c G6 server) Because of their larger size, full-height server blades support up to 4 processors, up to 32 DIMM slots, 2 hot-plug drives, 2 dual-port integrated Ethernet adapters, and 3 mezzanine slots for optional I/O cards. Full-height server blades also provide twice as much I/O bandwidth to the interconnect modules as half-height server blades (Figure 2). Figure 2.
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core technology delivers high performance and reduced latency for multi-threaded and multi-tasking environments. All ProLiant G6 server blades with AMD Opteron processors use ServerWorks® HT-2100 and HT-1000 chipsets. Figure 3.
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AMD Virtualization™ technology AMD Virtualization technology (AMD-V) is a set of hardware extensions to the six-core AMD Opteron architecture that allows better resource utilization. Hardware-based AMD-V technology translates virtual to physical memory addresses using Rapid Virtualization Indexing to increase performance and reduce latency.
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More information about HP Thermal Logic technologies is available on the HP website: www.hp.com/go/thermallogic. Processor socket technology The latest AMD Opteron processor packages use a processor socket technology called Land Grid Array (LGA). The processor package designs have no pins. Instead, the processor package has pads of gold-plated copper that touch processor socket pins on the motherboard.
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For applications that cannot take advantage of linear memory configuration, activating memory interleaving may improve performance. However, reducing the level of interleaving can result in power savings. System administrators can activate full interleaving or channel only interleaving using the HP ROM-Based Setup Utility (RBSU). 4 Memory interleaving breaks memory into 4-KB addressable entities. Table 1 shows how memory interleaving assigns memory.
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Figure 6. PCI Express bandwidth Link size Max. bandwidth (Send or receive) Total Bandwidth (Send and receive) x1 250 MB/s 500 MB/s x4 1 GB/s 2 GB/s x8 2 GB/s 4 GB/s A PCIe 2.0 device can be used in a PCIe 1.0 slot. For best performance, however, each card should be used in a slot that supports its logical link size. HP Smart Array controllers ProLiant c-Class server blades with AMD processors support SAS and SATA SFF drives through integrated or optional HP Smart Array controllers.
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SAS and SATA Small Form Factor hard drives HP Smart Array technology enables system designs that deploy high performance SAS and highcapacity SATA 7 SFF drives. This capability provides a broad range of storage solutions that give IT managers the flexibility to choose storage devices based on reliability, performance, and cost. SFF drives provide higher performance than large form factor drives. The smaller SFF platters reduce seek times because the heads have a shorter distance to travel.
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 Receive-side Scaling (RSS) for Windows dynamically load balances incoming traffic across all processors in a server.  iSCSI Acceleration (available on some integrated network adapters) offloads some of the work in creating iSCSI packets from the processor onto the network controller, freeing up the processor for other work.  iSCSI boot for Linux® makes it possible to boot the server from a storage area network (SAN) and eliminates the need for disk drives in a server.
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downloads the OS image from the iSCSI target disk. The HP iSCSI boot solution also includes scripts to significantly simplify the installation process. Adding an iSCSI HBA card is not required. Virtual Connect Virtual Connect technology is a set of interconnect modules and embedded software for c-Class enclosures that simplifies the setup and administration of server connections.
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Full details about Flex-10 technology are available in the technology brief titled “HP Flex-10 technology” on the HP technology website: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01608922/c01608922.pdf. Full details about Virtual Connect technology are available in the technology brief titled “HP Virtual Connect technology implementation for the HP BladeSystem c-Class” on the HP technology website: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00814156/c00814156.pdf.
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ProLiant Onboard Administrator (Integrated Lights-Out 2) for ProLiant server blades HP BladeSystem c-Class Server Blades include the ProLiant Onboard Administrator powered by iLO 2 to configure, update, and operate individual server blades remotely. The c-Class enclosure includes an Ethernet management network to aggregate all ProLiant Onboard Administrator (iLO 2) management communications across the entire enclosure.
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Power meter An integrated power meter in HP ProLiant c-Class server blades analyzes actual server power use. The BladeSystem Onboard Administrator can access the power meter through the ProLiant Onboard Administrator powered by iLO 2 or through external power management software such as HP Insight Power Manager (IPM). IPM also consolidates power data for multiple servers to a central location.
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For detailed information about HP Power Capping technologies and capabilities, refer to the HP technology brief titled “HP Power Capping and HP Dynamic Power Capping for ProLiant servers”: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01549455/c01549455.pdf. Data security technology with the Trusted Platform Module The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a hardware-based system security feature that can securely store information such as passwords and encryption keys to authenticate the platform.
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For more information For additional information, refer to the resources listed below. Resource description Web address “AMD Opteron™ and Intel® Xeon® x86 processors in industry-standard servers” technology brief http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/C 02731435/C02731435.pdf “Server virtualization technologies for x86-based HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers” technology brief http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c0 1067846/c01067846.