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Two blade servers in one

The awesome scale of online entertainment—the sheer volume of data and the always-on pace at which it is exchanged—is one of the defining phenomena of our times. But the pressure to support and exchange vast amounts of information at ever-faster speeds is also increasingly a matter of concern for enterprises in a wide range of markets.

Today, countless companies rely on high-performance computing (HPC) applications for research, development and analysis. A growing number are implementing cloud computing and Web 2.0 solutions for advanced animation, rendering, content creation and simulations. These companies often support hundreds of thousands of servers and multi-petabyte storage systems in order to meet demanding performance requirements.

Fortunately, the affordability of server solutions has enabled the deployment and expansion of high-performance “scale­out” environments to support these needs. Less fortunately, many data centers are running out of space and power.

Less space, more server

“When space and power are no longer available, organizations can expand their data center or build a new one, but that’s costly, time-consuming and introduces more complexity and administrative overhead,” says Ed Turkel, Manager of Product and Technology Marketing, Scalable Computing and Infrastructure at HP. “IT teams need extremely dense, power efficient server solutions that are based on industry standards and are easy to manage.”

To address these needs, HP has introduced a groundbreaking two-in-one blade server. The HP ProLiant BL2x220c G5 combines two independent servers in a single blade, enabling companies to double compute power and significantly reduce space and power requirements. It delivers 60 percent better performance per watt than similar configurations on the market, further reducing cooling and power costs.

“The BL2x220c is the industry’s first double-density server blade, offering more than three times the density of traditional 1U rack-mount servers,” says Turkel. “Its innovative design specifically addresses the exponential data growth facing companies with cloud computing, Web 2.0 and HPC deployments. Additionally, the new server blade uses HP’s award-winning management and configuration tools, which help drive down costs and mitigate risk.”

With the BL2x220c, organizations can enjoy 32 servers in one HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure. A single 42U rack can support 128 servers for a total of 1024 CPU cores and 2 terabytes of memory. And peak performance per rack is a staggering 12.3 teraflops.* In addition to density and performance attributes, the BL2x220c also reduces power consumption, providing over 220 megaflops LINPACK performance for each watt of power used. In addition, the c7000 enclosure uses Thermal Logic technology, which lowers airflow through the enclosure, reducing the load on data center cooling units.

Domain knowledge

Turkel indicates that HP offers scale-out customers the domain expertise that results from designing and retrofitting more than 30 million square feet of data center floor space, and HP BladeSystem c-Class blades are powering 176 sites of the Top 500 supercomputer installations. Also, the company recently created a dedicated set of resources, expertise and development efforts for organizations with scale-out deployments. The BL2x220c joins the new HP StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System (ExDS9100), a highly scalable storage system designed to simplify the management of multiple petabytes of data at an affordable cost, making it ideal for online and digital media businesses.

Add it all up, and the BL2x220c enables enterprises to build scalable, end-to-end infrastructures to support any kind of high-performance computing requirements, whether it’s for high-end research or helping people stay connected—or anything in between.

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