Private cloud looking knife analysis HX5 three reasons for Jianyun

Cloud computing as an IT infrastructure integration model has become the enterprise IT departments competing to understand and hope to go. However, pooling of its own computing resources can not be achieved overnight, in general, the need to go through four stages: the use of virtualization technology integration of resources, resource deployment and unified supervision, the above monitoring automation/intelligence, to deliver on demand to achieve the cloud.

So what is the point of the infrastructure level of high resource utilization, flexible expansion, and business resiliency that cloud computing emphasizes? From the development of the last two years, the x86 platform undoubtedly occupies an increasing market share, and both performance and reliability can already carry the main business of enterprise IT system. With IBM's launch of the fifth Generation X Architecture eX5 series server last year (see ZDNet earlier in this article), its unique extensibility design and RAS features based on the Intel Xeon 7500 series processor make the EX5 series Server A star in x86 domain.

Led by EX5, IBM in the 2010 fiscal year in the high-end x86 market to achieve the first market, an increase of 0.8%, based on the X5 architecture HX5 Blade Server has become the best ever sales of IBM 4 slots (through cascade expansion) Blade server. In IDC's analysis report, the 2011 driving x86 market continued to grow in one of the two elements is the spread of cloud computing in the enterprise (another element is mobile interconnection), and HX5 blades as both high-density and highly scalable computing node, will undoubtedly become the main enterprise deployment of private cloud products.

1, the private cloud environment to the server's three requirements

The reason why cloud computing can rise is that its "broken and then" to compute resources first break the physical partition between each server, through the virtual pool of resources to integrate, dynamic according to the business needs to allocate resources to the application. The advantage of this is that the utilization of the server is improved by means of integration, and the complexity of system management is greatly simplified.

To clarify the above two advantages, it can be said that cloud computing needs of the server where the author thinks there are three main aspects: high-density and virtualization performance, high scalability, high reliability guarantee.

Private cloud The computational resources are managed by pooling, so the operation performance of the single node server is not high This is the initial impression, because it is a unified resource, can not see the bottleneck. However, from the perspective of the entire virtual resource pool, it is natural that the higher the computational performance the better, the more resources can be provisioned. In the case of limited room size (and also limited management costs), this requires the calculation density of a single physical node: the faster the better, the higher the density the better. In addition, because virtualization technology is the basis for cloud computing, the server should be better at virtualization.

Because of the flexible business deployment and scalability features of cloud computing, there is another requirement for server hardware: the need to be as strong as possible to accommodate the need for resource pool computing resources to expand in the future, especially memory.

And for the application of the cloud computing environment is reliable pain point, has been questioned by the enterprise question. This requires that the server facing the private cloud of enterprise provide the corresponding guarantee from the design and the function characteristic in the reliability aspect.

Overall, blade servers have the highest computational density in the industry, so what about virtualization, scalability, and reliability? What kind of blades can meet the above requirements at the same time? The HX5 Blade, based on IBM's fifth Generation X architecture, almost perfectly satisfies the above requirements like a private cloud.

For the X5 blade server HX5 used by the max5-b, the red circle part of the EX5 chip developed by IBM, the small pieces of the motherboard on the silver heat sink chip below is the SMB chips, each responsible for 4 DIMMs, a total of 6, so the blade with MAX5 memory expansion capacity of 24 DIMMs, 8GB of capacity per DIMM, 192GB, more than existing dual-slot Xeon 5600 servers

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)