Review of the development and evolution of Blade Server since its inception in 2000

Understanding http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13737.html "> Blade server

Before reviewing the history of the blade server, let's start with a global understanding of this product that is not the same as a tower, rack, or cabinet server.

Blade server is actually a modular design of the "thin version" server, in order to minimize the use of cabinet space and optimized. The entire blade system consists of a blade chassis and a blade device. The Blade chassis (enclosure/chassis) accommodates multiple blade servers, while providing shared power, cooling, networking, and various interconnect and management components. Of course, the different blade manufacturers in the blade and the chassis to add which components, have the same design ideas.

High density is one of the most important advantages of blades. We know that in a standard 42U, 19-inch server cabinet, 1U (high 1.75 inches) stipulates the minimum size of any device, and there are strict restrictions on the number of mounting units for rack-mounted devices, such as up to 24 1U rack servers. and the main advantage of blade calculation is to eliminate this limitation, as of 2009, through the blade system, a cabinet can be achieved to accommodate 128 independent server ultra-high density!

Dell Blade Server

1 server Blade

Compared to a theoretical Turing machine, a modern computer requires only a few things: I/O is used to read commands and data, and to transmit the final results; The processor is used to execute these commands, compute the data, and memory to store the intermediate results. But in fact, so far, to make the computer system normal operation, also need to support other components, such as power supply, hard disk, network, human-Computer Interaction equipment (keyboard, monitor, mouse) and so on, these components not only occupy space, will produce heat, but also increase the system instability factors.

The emergence of blades has been modified to some extent, for example, some parts are shared (such as power supplies), some are virtualized (such as iSCSI storage can be remotely controlled via IP), and others are discarded (such as serial interfaces). In theory, as the blade server itself becomes simpler, its volume becomes smaller and the cost of manufacturing becomes lower.

HP's computational blade interior structure

2 Blade Chassis

For ordinary server systems, the chassis often assume some non-core computing services, such as power supplies, fans, and its use of components are often head, calorific value is relatively large, and each computer will be configured with the corresponding components, utilization rate is not high. For blade server systems, the use of shared parts can be greatly improved by centralizing these components in a chassis and sharing them with multiple compute blades. Of course, for the different manufacturers, the blade chassis specifications are also widely divergent.

3) Power supply

Because the blade server needs to work in a certain range of DC voltage, but the power company is the transmission of alternating current, and the voltage is higher than the internal components of the computer voltage required, so in order to achieve AC/DC power and voltage conversion, need one or more PSU. At the same time, to ensure that a single power supply failure does not affect the operation of the computer system, even the entry-level server will be equipped with redundant power, which will further increase the volume and calorific value of the system.

In general, the power of the blade chassis is shared by all blade servers. It can be a power module in the blade chassis, or it can be a stand-alone dedicated PSU system for multiple chassis for direct current. The latter can reduce the number of PSU while guaranteeing electricity. With the increasing popularity of blade servers, rack ups are becoming more popular, and there are even some dedicated UPS for blade servers, such as bladeups.

4 Cooling Heat

During the operation of the blade server, electrical components and mechanical components will generate heat, which must be properly disposed to ensure that the components work properly. Like most computing systems, the vast majority of blade enclosures are cooled by fans. But one problem that is often underestimated when designing a high-performance computer system is the contradiction between the heat generated by the system and the cooling function of the fan.

On the one hand, because the blade server shares power and cooling modules in the chassis, this means that it generates less heat than traditional servers. On the other hand, because the blade server is generally deployed more dense, when the number of blades in the cabinet more than half, it began to require greater cooling effect, for the early blade to say, this is more obvious. Practice has proved that a full equipped with the blade of the cabinet than full 1U rack servers need more cooling capacity, after all, the former can be in the same space to load 128 blade servers, the latter only 42 machines.

So, we see that some of the newer blade chassis for this use of high-speed adjustable fan, can be based on system requirements to regulate the cooling effect, and even some of the use of liquid cooling system.