Search results matching tags 'BladeSystem' and 'servers'

HP Delivers Industry-first Management Capabilities for Microsoft System Center

aimeeschoaf — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:29:00 GMT

By Lorre Bumgardner, Product Manager - HP Platforms/Partner management

Monday, April 27th marked a significant milestone in our 20+ year relationship with Microsoft. We are very excited about the news -- we launched the Insight Control suite for Microsoft System Center (ICE-SC) at Microsoft Management Summit. The first product of its kind, ICE-SC delivers a complete hardware infrastructure management solution directly in the System Center consoles.

What do I mean by "complete?" For example, "complete" to HP means things like total remote control (iLO), deep insight into ProLiant platforms, proactive virtual machine management (PRO pack), automated deployment (OSD), and power and performance management of the HP server infrastructure. Priced at $549 per managed server and backed by 24x7 support with free software updates, ICE-SC radically simplifies the management experience for HP customers who have standardized on Microsoft System Center. There's even an upgrade for current iLO Advanced customers priced at just $289.

Why now, and why charge for this functionality, you may ask? HP knows that most other server vendors are providing some of this functionality, such as OSD and PRO packs, for free. But HP's approach is to offer a complete, robust solution rather than just basic functionality that won't do everything our customers need. In addition to staying very close to our customer base, we've done a lot of research to determine what HP can do to make life simpler for the people who use our products. ICE-SC is the result of significant feedback from customers, extensive research and more than a year of working with the folks at Microsoft on development.

The "easy" approach would be to deliver minimal integration value, throw our management packs up on our web site and leave our customers to their own devices when it comes to support. But that's not the HP approach. While we'll continue to deliver basic management packs free of charge for SCOM and SCCM updates, we're confident that our customers who need more advanced functionality like automated deployment and virtual machine management expect more, because we've done our homework. You can learn more about this exciting new product at: www.hp.com/go/ICESystemCenter, or come visit us if you happen to be attending MMS!

AMD launches quad-core Shanghai processors

aimeeschoaf — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:47:00 GMT

This is an exciting time for our partner, AMD, as they launch their newest family of processors, and HP is pleased that our ProLiant portfolio will offer new capabilities computing to customers of all sizes. The new "Shanghai" products (Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2300 processors) will help HP customers gain greater computing power and business results when they build their infrastructure on HP ProLiant ML, DL and BL servers. Whether they are using virtualization technology to optimize their IT assets or they are consolidating their server inventory, HP ProLiant servers featuring the Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2300 processors will help customers do more business in a smaller footprint.

Around the globe, customers using AMD Opteron-based HP ProLiant servers value investment protection, consistent performance improvement, power efficiency and optimized design elements that enhance their virtualization strategies. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2300 processors deliver on these expectations with the larger 6GB L3 cache, Socket F compatibility, decreased power envelope, improved performance/watt and enhanced virtualization indexing. Watch for news on HP ProLiant offerings featuring the Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2300 processors.

- Rich Palmer

Director, HP Technology Strategy

Industry Standard Servers

I received a new HPC Multi-core server today – How to measure the power usage

d-field — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:38:00 GMT

Given that it is important to measure power usage and correlate it to application performance, how do you measure the power?

We use 2 different methods - one for rack-mounted servers and another for blade servers. The rack-mounted servers do not provide power meters, so we bought a power meter. We plug the server into the power meter, so we are measuring the total power used. Then, with a simple PC interface, we allow the application user on the server to obtain continuous power data which is easy to correlate with the applications.

This is easy for the users, but it requires planning and logistics and some work by our system managers, to connect the meter to the right server at the right time.

We often want to measure the power of a cluster running one HPC application in parallel, and it is usually sufficient to measure the power of any one server in the cluster running the application.

It is easier to measure power on an HP blade enclosure, since the enclosure contains power measurement capability and provides this data in a usable way. The available data includes the total enclosure power and also the power used by each blade server and each fan in the enclosure. We integrated this information with the Platform Computing LSF job scheduler. Now, users of our blade servers submit their jobs via LSF and automatically receive their power usage data as part of the job.

Next week, I expect to post a message from the SC08 conference.

I received a new HPC Multi-core server today - Initial performance testing

d-field — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:15:00 GMT

After the operating system boots on a new server model, it's time to start performance testing. I'm hoping to get some comments on this, since there are many different ways to proceed.

Personally, I am not a fan of industry standard benchmarks, but I think they are the best starting point for new product testing. For an HPC server, I want to check the basics, to ensure that the system meets its design goals - memory BW, memory/cache latency, 64-bit floating point math, and filesystem IO are the first measurements. We use STREAM, lmbench, LINPACK, and IOZONE standard benchmarks.

We compare the measurements to older models and to the goals of the new product. Since our group didn't design the product, we don't know if there are interesting but undocumented features which enhance or limit performance. I have a name for the process of performance testing of a new product - discovery engineering. We study the external behavior of a system and try to understand the design features which affect HPC performance.

Each of these standard benchmarks provides information about the server. In numerous cases, this information has solved performance mysteries in real codes. It is hard to solve a performance problem with a large, complex application. The standard benchmarks are a simpler starting point for problem-solving.

But we don't rely on industry standard benchmarks. By design, each one tests a subset of a server's performance characteristics. I've had little success predicting the performance of HPC ISV applications based on the standard benchmark results, since real applications require a balance of all the performance features in the system.

After using the standard benchmarks to assure ourselves that the system is running correctly, we can move on - measure performance on real ISV applications, and experimenting with multi-core processor configurations!

I received a new HPC Multi-core server today!

d-field — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:16:00 GMT

About this blog series - This is the 1^st posting of a series which describes the experiences of engineers who test the performance of HPC servers and server clusters at HP.

My name is Dave Field. I lead an engineering group at HP - we measure the performance of new HP servers. In addition to the common industry-standard benchmarks, we concentrate on the performance of real HPC ISV applications. In the 20+ years we have done this work, we have seen many server architectures. These days, HPC clusters of servers using multi-core processors occupy most of our energy.

We evaluate the performance of new server products, so receiving a new server model is a common occurrence. This has been an especially rich year for new products - this is the 14^th new HP server we've tested this year, with at least one more to go before the year is over. HP servers for HPC span the range of industry-standard processors - Intel Xeon and Itanium2 and AMD Opteron. (In HP terminology, the processor is the physical component which plugs into the system board. A processor contains one or more cores, or CPUs.) And for each processor type, there are specific models with different architectural features.

Since we test pre-production, or prototype, computers, it's not quite true that I received a server - we usually receive new product kits. Testing new products can be very interesting, but to get to the interesting part, there are inevitably a number of problems to solve. We need to turn the kit into a working computer, then ensure that the performance meets the product specs, before we can do meaningful performance evaluation. These initial steps are lessons in patience and expectation-setting, during which I always meet some new people who will help in problem-solving.

The new server kit usually contains the server enclosure, system board, and processors. To turn the kit into a computer, we need to obtain three layers of stuff - supporting hardware (the right DIMMs, network interfaces, and disks), firmware, and operating system.

Firmware is in flux during the pre-production period, and each version of pre-production firmware changes the server's performance. Usually the processors are pre-production versions, tied to specific firmware revs. Most of the performance data collected on these early versions will be discarded. But if we don't get some measurements now, we can't influence the product. Sometimes we identify performance issues which can be fixed before production release - so this is a very satisfying part of the job.

These days, the current versions of the major Linux distributions work out-of-the-box on new server models.

When the operating system boots, we can begin to measure performance!

Happy 15th Birthday ProLiant!

JamesMouton — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:45:00 GMT

It's exciting to realize that HP ProLiant is about to turn 15 years old. At the same time, it makes me feel old when I think back to my days as a product manager at Compaq, responsible for the launch of the product family. That was a few gray hairs ago, let me tell you!

Fifteen years and over 15 million ProLiants sold around the globe. That's a long road for this technology to travel and remain the world's #1 x86 server at the same time. Can you think of any other product, in ANY other industry or segment, that can claim it's been #1 in the market for 15 years? I can't!

You know one of the best things about the ProLiant family of products? It's all the innovation that's been launched by smart and creative engineers, out-of-the box thinking customers and partners who always challenge us to do more and more. Yeah, that's right. HP ProLiant is a team effort.

In its first year, the ProLiant family brought a number of innovations to market, including:

SMP (Symmetrical Multiprocessor) architecture;
Offline backup processor with automated recovery;
2MB Transaction Blaster;
Fast Wide SCSI;
Advanced Error Checking & Correcting memory;
SMART array controller;
and Hot Plug drives.

Today, we see evidence of ProLiant innovation in our newest family of products, the BladeSystem. The approach we took to bring a blade-based infrastructure to life for customers is very much like the drive and ingenuity used to launch ProLiant 15 years ago. It's exciting to see that spirit is still thriving within HP.

I want to hear from you! Tell me what's your favorite thing about ProLiant.