What makes a server “enterprise” class? Is it big and expensive that makes a server “enterprise” class? Is it the “cool & hip” factor? Is it…?
I would content it is RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) that makes a server “enterprise” class. IBM is famous for making enterprise class servers (their mainframes and AIX frames). However, I am now including the HP Bladecenter.
I have attended a week long HP Bladecenter class and came away impressed. Years ago, I used HP’s p-class blades and was left unimpressed, as with IBM’s Bladesystem. These are 1st generation blades where they are just vertically placed slimmed down 1U servers. However, with 2nd generation HP blades – c-class blades, the enclosure itself takes on a dramatic metamorphosis. It is now a “system” instead of just a collection of small servers. Virtual connect modules on a c-class Bladecenter allows for high degree of RAS. Properly configured, any blade server in the enterprise (up to 16,000 blade servers) can take on a designed MAC and WWN, thus making rezoning, rehosting and “special” MAC a thing of the past. Once the initial configurations are given to the SAN and Network team, they can be out of the picture for any future add/move/change processes. The OS and supporting applications can be “moved” to another blade server if a scheduled or unscheduled hardware event happened within a few minutes!
What was even more impressive is the “scriptability” of their Bladecenter. A little primitive, Cisco IOS like, but nonetheless, command scripts (and can be ssh to the “onboard administrator module” and virtual connect modules and scripted from Powershell or csh/ksh/bash). It is extremely exciting to be able to open a PuTTY session remotely (thousands of miles away), create some SAN fabrics, network links and network trunking, spin-up a blade, assign the MAC and WWN, RDP or snap an OS image to it and have it up and running. All scripting, all remotely!
The next adventure will be to have VMWare vSphere 4 on a set of blades and also Cisco Nexus 1000V. Testing out the capability of vMotion between enclosures and supporting multiple trust-level networks (separated networks, firewalled zones and VLANs).
I am highly impressed with HP’s Bladecenter and I think it is really an enterprise-class system at this point.
