HP Blade System c-Class

HP was first to deliver in the UK blade server market with its compact BL e-Class, which set a very high standard in terms of features and processing density. Since then it's gone from strength to strength and the latest Blade System c-Class represents a completely new architecture that has been designed from the ground up.

HP has turned to its SuperDome family and taken concepts from these to improve performance whilst the Himalaya non-stop servers provide inspiration for fault tolerance. Management capabilities come from the ProLiant server products along with their iLO (integrated lights out) features and the c-Class is designed to integrate with all of HP's standard management software.

At its foundation is the 7000c enclosure which stands at 10U high and offers sixteen half-height or eight full-height server blade slots. It has a 5Tb/sec mid-plane which also incorporates design concepts from Tandem systems. All sixteen slot connectors are routed through to multiple power supplies and network expansion modules and each blade has its ports directed to different expansion slots for network connections. Power is particularly well catered for as the chassis has six power inputs at the rear each fed by a hot-plug supply. Fault tolerance is extremely good as you would need to lose four power supplies before a server blade slot would fail.

The new cooling modules are rather smart as they are based on jet engine design principals with the aim of achieving maximum efficiency and low noise levels. A quick peek down the end of a fan module is enough to confirm this as the metal fan is, indeed, shaped more like a turbine. All air flow from the fan modules is spread across the entire chassis so each blade slot does not have any dedicated modules. Louvres in each blade slot only open when a fan module is present and thermal sensors in the chassis can control fan speeds dynamically. If you do need to replace a fan module you'll be pleased to know they only cost around £80 each.

An operator panel and LCD screen is provided on the chassis for basic system commissioning, fault analysis, assigning IP addresses to individual blades and checking on general system health. Usefully, it provides a chat mode where text based conversations can be conducted between a remote manager and support staff local to system. Up to two management blades can be installed for redundancy and each is equipped with network and serial ports plus an embedded iLO 2 chip. Connectivity options abound as the chassis has eight slots at the rear and HP offers an extensive range of modules. These include 16-port pass-through blades plus Gigabit switches which have been designed by Cisco Systems specifically for HP. Other modules include 12 and 24-port Brocade FC SAN switches and another with eight copper Gigabit and four mini-GBIC slots with SFP modules available for SX, LX and LH fibre connections.

HP's virtual connection module tackles the problems of blade deployment in large businesses with complex security and change management procedures. It allows you to use your own MAC address pool so when a blade is replaced with a new one it can be assigned an address from a virtual pool. This is designed to speed up deployments and upgrades and is quite secure as HP creates and registers the MAC addresses in the pool for you. A virtual connect module with a pool of WWNs for FC SAN deployment is expected later this year.