RE: Matt

"I don't bother lookign up the MTBF for LAN cards nowadays, it's very high, but I still put at least two in my servers to ensure that if one dies (and Murphy's Law dictates the likelyhood increases with the latest of the hour, it being a weekend, and your CIO being heavily involved in delivering the project!) I don't lose access to my server. If the LAN NEM in your 8000p chassis fails - whch would take out both ports - and you have a SAN module in the other slot, then your servers just became said expensive heaters."

Yeah, may be you need some education about the MTBF numbers of components when thinking about redundancy. And you probably also need to learn the effect of a component failure on the running system. Because, when a LAN card fails, you are pretty much assured that the OS is likely not in a good state to run your applications, whether you have a redundant network or not. So you have a redundant blade out there already, you surely thought about that, didn't you ?

"Having seen your tenuous grasp on enterprise computing, I'm guessing you copied that from a more knowledgeable aquaintance. As usual, your "rebuttals" are just insults, and carry no technical weight. Try thinking up a counter-argument for a change."

Yeah, when you speak in that language without quantifying your arguments, you are talking to a deaf ear - no insult there. What we are seeing from you end are not point by point counter arguments, but blind love for HP.

"Strangely, the market doesn't seem to think so, and I've yet to run into a situation with HP blades where memory size was an issue. I take it "It's got lots of memory" is going to be the Sun feature sell on this then? Yeah, that'll work...."

So may be you can give feedback to HP to cut down on the DIMM slots on DL585/DL580 as well, because YOU never needed that in your work. May be it's high time you also try to understand economics of memory in servers, and how server virtualization trend is fueling up the need for more memory. Oh yeah, why did HP need to put 24 DIMM slots on their 4-socket Itanium blade and make it double wide ? They could surely make a single width blade with 4 itanics and 16 DIMM slots and stuff in more blades there !!

"If by "constellation" (Sunshiner marketing codename?) you mean the 8000 and 8000p then you're shovelling that male bovine manure again - the quad-quad x8450 blades won't fit into the 6000 chassis. Mind you I thought "constellation" was the codename for the 6000 chassis, so your statement is almost as ludicrous as the rest of your reply."

That's the reason you need to shut your mouth before speaking up and try to at-least do some basic research before making a counter-argument. You have become so arrogant that you don't find the need to familiarize yourself before talking on a subject. So you can comment on something because you 'thought' something, anyway, I don't expect you to do any homework based on your history of a staunch and arrogant sun basher, and a flamboyant HP fanboy. Short story, Constellation is not Sun blade 6000. It's a HPC rack that holds 4 rows of 6000 series (10U) blades, each row holding 12 blades. So, in one rack you can put 4x12=48 blades.The blades you put are the same blades you can put in 6000 chassis. For TACC, the blade is called x6420 (The details are on the TACC website). This is a 10U blade that can hold 4 AMD sockets and 32 DIMM slots. There is no switch on the rack each blade is connected directly with the giant magnum IB switch with a special 3-1 IB splitter cable for minimizing cable clutter. Since there is no intermediate switch, node to node latency is the minimum possible for an IB network.

TACC uses pre-release barcelona chips on x6420 . So expect to see the same blades for 6000 chassis once fixed barcelona chips are out. And of course, there is no reason to believe why similar blades with Xeon should not be available shortly thereafter.

So yes, please re-do the accounting. How many 4-socket bladed can HP fit in a rack ? How many total IB switches are needed ? Do the HP fanboy math. Don't show me the core count with the half hight toys, the solution need 4-socket ones here.

RE: Matt

"You obviously do not work in high-availability environments, or even remotely administered environments. If you have a single LAN NEM and it fails, you lose LAN access to the blades.."

On the contrary I am certain you don't seem to understand the failure points in a network. There are two LAN ports in each NEM, and the NEM is not the likely component to fail. The two ports on the NEM can be configured as redundant network and if one 'link' get's clogged, the other port can provide redundancy.

"Erm.... it's also superior to the Sun solution, so superior that (in my opinion) Dell have cloned .."

HP fanboy speaking > /dev/null

So superior is the blade design that they can't put in enough memory and I/O for a 4-socket server ? Even 2-socket full heights don't have enough DIMM slots !!

Need half height toys for running edge apps ? - Choose HP blade - perfect !!

Feel free to ignore to yor advantage.

"If I'm translating that correctly, you're saying that not being able to fit the Sun dualies and quads in the same chassis was an intentional Sun ploy to steal a massive advantage?"

Read correctly, the blades in constellation chassis and 6000 chassis are inter-changeable.

"And have you seen the TACC Ranger system that uses the x6420? Every third rack is a cooler rack. So any arguments on rack density have to be reduced by a third. Try again!"

Now are you going to tell me HP's blade cooling would take the heat out and replace with cold shower ? Of course HP blades can't even dream of getting close to the density of constellation solution - calculate for yourself and you would know. (forget the cabling and latency) Oh yeah, I know, HP's magical 'active cooling' exhumes all the heat from the blade and then sends out chilled air around to keep the datacenter cool- isn't it ?