Ok so we thought it would be useful to highlight some of the technical announcements on the Superdome2 architecture announced here in Frankfurt.
It is based on an 18U enclosure that goes into a standard HP rack. This enclosure takes 2s Cell blades each with 2 sockets (8 cores) and 512GB RAM each. Each blades has 3 Mezzanine cards. The 18U enclosure shares common components with the C7000 such as power supplies, fans, power inputs and insight display.
Common Converged Platform:
- Common management across ProLiant and Integrity including BladeSystem Matrix/Insight Dynamics, Onboard Administrator, and iLO3
- Common enclosures and spares, which I've already mentioned a few times. It will be a common theme this week
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Fault Tolerant crossb ar fabrix with end-to-end retry – all transactions are tracked to successful completion
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Allows independent scaling of IO and CPU.
SD2 analysis engine
- Consistent monitoring and analysis of system fault data
- Self heals by driving response to failures.
Online Serviceability
- Tool free HP components
- Single click online firmware upgrades (that will not bring down the enclosure)
- Firmware inventory control.
Power-on-once Technology
- Fault tolerant fabric with end-to-end retry for all transactions in the chipset. Every transaction is tracked to completion, rerouted through a secondary path if needed, and allows independent scaling of I/O and CPU. This allows customers to optimize Superdome 2 for their specific workload - whether it is CPU intensive or an I/O intensive workload.
- Superdome 2 Analysis Engine provides constant monitoring and analysis of system fault data. The server also self heals by driving responses to failure - in other words, instead of a simple error message, it also suggests how to fix it. If the first fix doesn't work, it knows that to try next. It is kind of like adding an HP service engineer with every system.
- Online Serviceability with tool free hot pluggable components. While we didn't have systems in this session, I will say that the tool free demo was impressive during Martin Fink's keynote and server tear down demo.
Longevity and investment protection for the next decade
- Superdome was available for 10 years. This platform will take us through quite a few years more. There is a stable and committed roadmap for 3 Itanium processor generations. It runs HP-UX 11i v3, so applications don't need to be re-certified.