Analysis

posted on 17 June 2008 07:37

HP has announced a blade server implementation of its Integrity (Tandem) NonStop high-availability, fault-tolerant servers. The bladed form factor reduces NonStop costs. The NonStop ServerNet interconnect has the characteristics needed to be the secret interconnect used in HP's Extreme Data System 9100 extremely scalable storage system.

The ExDS9100, with its multi-petabyte scalability and PolyServe clustered file system, has industry standard processors -  C-class server blades -  talking to storage nodes or blocks with any processor able to talk to any storage node. This requires an interconnect fabric in the ExDS cabinet but HP has refused to discuss the nature of this interconnect.

ServerNet is a fabric interconnect with routers delivering an effective point-to-point network inside a NonStop server box. You can download details of it below.)

With the bladed NonStop announcement it is clear that HP has managed to put its NonStop ServerNet to work inside a bladed server form factor. This makes it slightly more likely that the interconnect fabric inside the bladed server ExDS9100 is ServerNet and not either Fibre Channel or InfiniBand.

As to why HP is being coy about the ExDS9100 interconnect details that is a mystery too. However, ExDS9100 pricing has been said by HP to be very aggressive, less than $2/GB, and it may be that HP doesn't want customers thinking they can use a cheap ExDS9100 to provide ServerNet-accessed storage facilities less expensively than having Integrity NonStop ServerNet-accessed storage.

^{[Chris Mellor]}

Download file: NonStopServer Net.pdf