Return of the 8 way
It seems like just yesterday Compaq Proliant 8500’s were the bomb with 8 – 550 mhz processors. 4.4 ghz of processing madness! That was even before hyperthreading and multi-cores. Since then, the big 3 server hardware vendors eliminated 8 way machines in their commodity server lines. You still had 8 way options but there were more cost effective configurations because multi-core processors removed the need for 8 way boxes in most cases.
That is until now as HP releases the dl785 g5. Eight sockets capable of running quad-core 2.3GHz AMD Opterons. That is a combined speed of 73.6GHz. They comes with 8GB of RAM but they support 256GB of RAM(512GB when 8GB dimm's become available). The servers, themselves, are going to be relatively cheap compared to the high end SAN's and large amount of memory needed to get the throughput high enough tax the processor sub system. Without a large spindle count\cache and amount of RAM, the system will have an IO bottleneck long before the processors in most cases. Of course, some applications have special needs. :)
So when will these come into play? I think the biggest use of this box will be for consolidation particularly on SQL Server 2008. Imagine taking 20 or 40 instances on different OS’s, hardware, storage etc and making it one(or even 2 or 3) SQL Server 2008 instance. The environment would be so much easier to manage. The SQL Server 2008 resource governor was made for consolidation. Some of the new features in SQL Server 2008 are going to be CPU hungry like the spatial data, partition parallelism improvements and transparent data encryption. The data and backup compression features push both ways by lowering IO and increasing CPU with the idea of decreasing execution time. Even if you go to SQL 2005, it would be a nice upgrade for a consolidation box.
Of course, you have to worry about having all of your eggs in one basket but that is another post.
Introducing the dl785 g5:
| Processor & Memory | |
|---|---|
| Processor type | AMD Opteron™ 8300 Series |
| Available processors | Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ Model 8354 (2.2GHz) Quad Core AMD Opteron™ Model 8356 (2.3GHz) |
| Processor cores | Quad |
| Processor cache | 512KB L2 Cache per core 2MB Shared L3 Cache |
| Sockets | 8 |
| Memory type | PC2-5300 Registered DDR2 at 667MHz |
| Standard memory | 8 GB (or 16GB depends on model) |
| Max memory | 256 GB |
| Memory protection | Advanced ECC |
| Storage | |
|---|---|
| Storage type | Hot plug SFF SAS |
| Max internal drives | 8 standard, with an option to add 8 more for a total of 16 |
| Removable media bays | 1 |
| Expansion slots | 11 pci-e (3x16, 3x8 & 5x4) slots |
| Storage controller | SmartArray P400i (embedded) |
| Deployment | |
|---|---|
| Form factor | Rack |
| Rack height | 7U |
| Networking | Embedded dual NC371i Multifunction Gigabit Network controller |
| Remote management | Integrated Lights Out 2 (iLO 2 |
| Redundant power supply | Optional |
| Redundant fans | Standard |
| Warranty - year(s) (parts/labor/onsite) | 3/3/3 |
| Additional Warranty Information | Additional Warranty Information. |
