Tag Archives: SAS

Storage Options for Blade Servers

As technology trends like software defined storage (SDS) become more adopted in data centers, it will be interesting to see how it will impact the blade server market – especially with current research showing an expectation of growth over the next 5 years.  To succeed, blade server vendors will have to find ways to adopt to changing technology trends- especially SDS.   Continue reading

A First Look at HPE Synergy Hardware

HPE introduced a new modular architecture in January called HPE Synergy – a new platform designed for composable infrastructure (read about this from Forbes here.)  For this post, I’ll be focusing on the hardware components only with hopes of writing something up on the software piece in the future.

Continue reading

A Closer Look at the Dell FD332 for FX Architecture

[updated 4.13.15 Today Dell officially started shipping the FC430 and the FD332 Storage blocks for the Dell FX Architecture.  The FC430 is a slick, server offering for many workloads, but many questions pop up around what the FD332 is and how it can be used, so in today’s post I’m hoping to clarify it for you.

Continue reading

IBM BladeCenter HS22 Delivers Best SPECweb2005 Score Ever Achieved by a Blade Server

HS22According to IBM’s System x and BladeCenter x86 Server Blog, the IBM BladeCenter HS22 server has posted the best SPECweb2005 score ever from a blade server.  With a SPECweb2005 supermetric score of 75,155, IBM has reached a benchmark seen by no other blade yet to-date.  The SPECweb2005 benchmark is designed to be a neutral, equal benchmark for evaluting the peformance of web servers.  According to the IBM blog, the score is derived from three different workloads measured:

  • SPECweb2005_Banking – 109,200 simultaneous sessions
  • SPECweb2005_Ecommerce – 134,472 simultaneous sessions
  • SPECweb2005_Support – 64,064 simultaneous sessions

The HS22 achieved these results using two Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X5570 (2.93GHz with 256KB L2 cache per core and 8MB L3 cache per processor—2 processors/8 cores/8 threads). The HS22 was also configured with 96GB of memory, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux® 5.4 operating system, IBM J9 Java® Virtual Machine, 64-bit Accoria Rock Web Server 1.4.9 (x86_64) HTTPS software, and Accoria Rock JSP/Servlet Container 1.3.2 (x86_64).

It’s important to note that these results have not yet been “approved” by SPEC, the group who posts the results, but as soon as they are, they’ll be published at at http://www.spec.org/osg/web2005

The IBM HS22 is IBM’s most popular blade server with the following specs:

  • up to  2 x Intel 5500 Processors
  • 12 memory slots for a current maximum of 96Gb of RAM
  • 2 hot swap hard drive slots capable of running RAID 1 (SAS or SATA)
  • 2 PCI Express connectors for I/O expansion cards (NICs, Fibre HBAs, 10Gb Ethernet, CNA, etc)
  • Internal USB slot for running VMware ESXi
  • Remote management
  • Redundant connectivity

ibm_hs22_nehalem_blade