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HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure

technology brief, 3rd edition

Abstract.............................................................................................................................................. 3

Overview of HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure ....................................................................................... 4

HP Thermal Logic technologies .............................................................................................................. 6

Active Cool fans .............................................................................................................................. 6

HP PARSEC architecture.................................................................................................................... 7

Parallel........................................................................................................................................ 7

Redundant................................................................................................................................... 9

Scalable.................................................................................................................................... 10

Thermal Logic for the server blade.................................................................................................... 10

Power supplies and enclosure power subsystem................................................................................. 11

Pooled power ............................................................................................................................ 13

Dynamic Power Saver mode ........................................................................................................ 14

Power Regulator......................................................................................................................... 15

Power Capping for each server blade........................................................................................... 16

HP BladeSystem Power Sizer ....................................................................................................... 16

Interconnect options and infrastructure.................................................................................................. 16

Interconnect modules ...................................................................................................................... 18

Server blades ................................................................................................................................19

Storage and other option blades...................................................................................................... 19

Mezzanine cards ........................................................................................................................... 20

Virtual Connect.............................................................................................................................. 21

Fabric connectivity and port mapping............................................................................................... 21

c7000 bay to bay crosslinks ........................................................................................................... 22

Device bay crosslinks.................................................................................................................. 23

Interconnect bay crosslinks .......................................................................................................... 23

Managing the c7000 enclosure .......................................................................................................... 23

Onboard Administrator................................................................................................................... 24

Detecting component insertion and removal................................................................................... 24

Identifying components ............................................................................................................... 24

Managing power and cooling ..................................................................................................... 25

Controlling components............................................................................................................... 25

Redundant enclosure management ............................................................................................... 26

User interfaces for Onboard Administrator .................................................................................... 26

Role-based user accounts............................................................................................................. 27

Integrated Lights-Out 2 for c-Class server blades ................................................................................ 27

Insight Display ............................................................................................................................... 27

HP Insight Control Environment for BladeSystem ................................................................................ 29

Unified Infrastructure Management ............................................................................................... 29

Lights-Out Remote Management ................................................................................................... 29

Precise Power Measurement and Regulation .................................................................................. 30

Summary of content (35 pages)

PAGE 1
HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure technology brief, 3rd edition Abstract.............................................................................................................................................. 3 Overview of HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure ....................................................................................... 4 HP Thermal Logic technologies .............................................................................................................. 6 Active Cool fans ....
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Proactive Performance Monitoring and Bottleneck Analysis.............................................................. 30 Rapid Server Deployment ............................................................................................................ 30 Consolidated Vulnerability Assessment and Patching ...................................................................... 30 Unified Virtual and Physical Systems Management .........................................................................
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Abstract As server, storage, and network technologies have changed, traditional rack-mounted infrastructure solutions have generated increased complexity of both infrastructure management and physical data center deployment. The HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure is an evolution of the entire rack-mounted infrastructure.
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Overview of HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure The HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure was the first enclosure implemented using the BladeSystem c-Class architecture. 1 It is optimized for enterprise data center applications. It fits into standard size HP and third-party racks and accommodates the c-Class form-factor server blades, storage blades, and interconnect modules.
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• Up to eight interconnect modules simultaneously supporting a variety of network interconnect fabrics such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel (FC), InfiniBand (IB), Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI), or Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) • Active Cool fan kits for a maximum of ten fans • Up to six power supplies • Redundant Onboard Administrator (OA) management modules (optional active-standby design) Both c-Class enclosures have common critical components such as servers, interconnects, mezzanine cards, st
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HP Thermal Logic technologies The HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure incorporates a variety of HP Thermal Logic technologies, including mechanical design features, built-in intelligence, and control capabilities. Thermal Logic technologies provide significant power and cooling savings—as much as 40 percent compared to traditional rack and tower based servers. Thermal Logic technologies also provide an instant view of power use and temperature at the server, enclosure, or rack level.
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Figure 4. Ducted fan cross-section and ducted fan blade compared to traditional server fan Active Cool fans are controlled by the c-Class Onboard Administrator. The Onboard Administrator can ramp cooling capacity up or down based on system needs. Along with optimizing the airflow, the control algorithm optimizes the acoustic levels and power consumption.
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Figure 5. HP BladeSystem c7000 self-sealing enclosure The enclosure and the components within it optimize the cooling capacity through unique mechanical designs. Managed airflow through the enclosure ensures that every device gets cool air, that no device is situated in the path of hot exhaust air from another device, and that air goes only where it is needed for cooling. Fresh air is pulled into the interconnect bays through a slot in the front of the enclosure.
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Figure 6. Airflow through the HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure – side view Redundant As illustrated in Figure 7, fans located in each of four cooling zones provide direct cooling for server blades in their respective zone and redundant cooling for adjacent zones. Each zone can contain four server blades. Full-height server blades couple the two vertical zones into a single zone, as in the example in Figure 7 where a full-height server blade in bay 1 has resulted in zones 1 and 3 operating as a single zone.
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Zone cooling minimizes the power consumption of the fan subsystem by increasing fan efficiency in a single zone if one of the server blades requires more cooling. This saves operating costs and minimizes fan noise. HP recommends using at least eight fans. Using ten fans optimizes power and cooling. See the appendix for more detailed fan and server population guidelines. Scalable Operating c-Class server blades requires installing a minimum of four fans at the rear of the c7000 enclosure.
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Figure 9. Processor heat sink using fully ducted design (left) versus traditional heat sink in a 1U rack-mount server (right) Instant thermal monitoring provides a real-time view of heat, power, and cooling data. The Onboard Administrator retrieves thermal information from all server blades, storage blades, and interconnect modules in the enclosure to ensure an optimal balance between cooling, acoustic levels, and power consumption.
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Figure 10 illustrates the c7000 enclosure power options. Figure 10. c7000 enclosure power options Moving the power supplies into the enclosure allows HP to reduce the transmission distance for DC power distribution and to use an industry-standard 12V infrastructure for the BladeSystem c7000 enclosure. By using a 12V infrastructure, HP eliminated several power-related components and improved power efficiency on the server blades and in the infrastructure.
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example, under normal operating conditions, a system configuration of 16 server blades with 2 CPUs each, 4 to 8 GB of RAM, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and all components at 100 percent load uses approximately 4 to 4.5 kVA. In customer environments, most systems will probably consume less than 4 kVA because all components will not be at 100 percent load simultaneously. Actual measurements of real customer applications show usage numbers between 3 and 3.5 kVA.
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Figure 11. This logical grouping ensures that when the enclosure is configured with the three-phase AC input module, all the power supplies on one side will maintain enclosure power if AC input power is lost on the other side. If the user configures the enclosure power mode to N+1 or not redundant, the power supplies can be installed in any bay. Figure 11.
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have an efficiency rating as low as 60 percent. However, at 50 percent load, the efficiency rating could be up to 90 percent, providing a significant savings in power consumption. In the first example in Figure 12, without Dynamic Power Saver, power demand is low and spread inefficiently across six power supplies. In the second example, with Dynamic Power Saver active, the power load is shifted to two power supplies for more efficient operation.
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Power Capping for each server blade Using iLO 2 firmware version 1.30 and System ROM/BIOS dated May 1, 2007, or later, HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades have the ability to limit the amount of power consumed. Customers can set a limit in watts or BTUs per hour. The purpose of this limit is to constrain the amount of power consumed, which reduces heat output into the data center.
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Figure 13. Illustration showing both the server blade connectors and the interconnect module connectors By taking advantage of the similar four-trace, differential SerDes transmit and receive signals, the NonStop signal midplane can support either network-semantic protocols (such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand) or memory-semantic protocols (PCI Express), using the same signal traces. Figure 14 illustrates how the physical lanes can be logically overlaid onto sets of four traces.
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Figure 14. Logically overlaying physical lanes (right) onto sets of four traces (left) The NonStop signal midplane has eight 200-pin connectors to support eight individual switches, four double bay switches, or a combination of the two. It provides the flexibility of 1x, 2x, or 4x connections from the server blade mezzanine cards which provide connectivity to the interconnect bays.
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NOTE The c-Class Ethernet Pass-Thru Module only supports fixed speed gigabit Ethernet. Because the server, storage, or other option blades are connected through SerDes to the interconnect bays, and SerDes Ethernet does not have an auto-negotiation protocol, a switch is required to connect to 10/100 networks outside of the enclosure. The NICs themselves are capable of different modes of operation, but the outbound wiring to which they are connected is not auto-negotiation friendly.
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For a full-height server blade, a mezzanine card is required to connect to the direct attach storage blade. The card must be in the Mezzanine 3 connector to allow full use of the interconnect bays with Type I or Type II mezzanine cards, to be consistent with the half-height blades, and to enable mixing half-height and full-height server blades in the same enclosure.
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Virtual Connect With the c-Class architecture, HP introduced a new type of interconnect technology: Virtual Connect. As it is implemented in the c-Class architecture, Virtual Connect technology provides virtualized server I/O connections to the Ethernet (LAN) or Fibre Channel (SAN) networks. Virtual Connect technology virtualizes the server-edge so that networks can communicate with pools of HP BladeSystem server blades rather than the conventional one-to-one relationship.
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Figure 15. HP BladeSystem c7000 port mapping of half-height server blades to interconnect bays Figure 16. HP BladeSystem c7000 port mapping of full-height server blades to interconnect bays Port mapping differs slightly between full-height and half-height server blades due to the support for additional mezzanine cards on the full-height version.
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Device bay crosslinks Device bay crosslinks are wired between adjacent horizontal device bay pairs as indicated by the arrows in the c7000 enclosure front view (Figure 17). For half-height server blades, these signals are used for four-lane PCIe connection to a partner blade such as a tape blade or PCI expansion blade.
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interconnect module management processors such as the HP Virtual Connect Manager. Integrating all these management capabilities provides powerful hardware management for remote administration, local diagnostics, and troubleshooting. Onboard Administrator The heart of the c-Class enclosure management is the Onboard Administrator. The Onboard Administrator module in the c7000 enclosure provides four services for the entire enclosure: detection, identification, management, and control.
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Managing power and cooling The most important Onboard Administrator tasks are power control and thermal management. The Onboard Administrator can remotely control the power state of all components in BladeSystem c-Class enclosures. For components in device bays in the front of each enclosure, the Onboard Administrator communicates with iLO 2 to control servers and communicates with a microcontroller to control options such as storage blades. A separate microcontroller controls power to interconnect modules.
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(I2C), serial, and Ethernet connections. These management interface connections are completely isolated from the server blade connections to interconnect modules. c7000 external management interfaces Each c7000 enclosure has several external management interfaces that connect the user to the Onboard Administrator as shown in Figure 19.
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as the service port for temporary local Ethernet access to the Onboard Administrators and devices in linked enclosures. Security is maintained for all user interfaces through user authentication. User accounts created in the Onboard Administrator define three user privilege levels and the component bays to which each level is granted access.
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Figure 20. Insight Display on the c7000 enclosure When the c7000 enclosure is initially powered on, the enclosure UID LED and the Insight Display are illuminated blue to identify the enclosure being configured. The Insight Display automatically launches an installation wizard to guide the user through the configuration process. After the enclosure is configured, the Insight Display verifies that there are no installation or configuration errors.
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HP Insight Control Environment for BladeSystem HP Insight Control Environment for BladeSystem is HP engineered software that provides complete lifecycle management for HP BladeSystem, including hardware health and performance monitoring; comprehensive remote control; rapid server deployment; vulnerability scanning and patch management; and power and thermal measurement, reporting, capping and regulation. The software is delivered on DVD media.
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Precise Power Measurement and Regulation HP Insight Control Environment for BladeSystem delivers precise power and thermal measurement and reporting for HP BladeSystem infrastructure components. New power capping functionality complements existing power regulation technology. Power capping enables customers to limit power use at a specific wattage or at a percentage of a server's maximum power rating.
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• Rapid recovery capabilities that enable virtual machine restoration on any available host. With unified management of physical and virtual resources, systems administrators can extend existing management processes to their virtualized infrastructures while leveraging best-in-class technology for virtual machine deployment, monitoring, and control.
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Appendix: Fan and server population guidelines For correct operation, fans and server blades must be installed in the correct bays of the HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure. The Onboard Administrator ensures that fans and blades are correctly placed before allowing systems to power on. Figure A-1 indicates the location of the ten fan bays in the back of the enclosure. The table below the figure identifies the correct bays in which up to ten fans must be located. Figure A-1.
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Figure A-2. Numbering of half-height server bays in the HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure The c7000 enclosure is divided into four partitions, or quadrants, by vertical support metalwork. Within each partition a removable divider is used to support half height devices. To install a fullheight server blade in any partition, this divider must be removed. As a consequence, any partition can only contain either full-height server blades or half-height server blades. Figure A-3.
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server blade or a blade blank must be installed in the half-height bay above the SB40c. Installing a half-height server blade above the SB40c requires first installing a half-height bracket. The storage blade requires an HP SB40c PCI-express pass-thru mezzanine card in the mezzanine 3 connector.
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For more information For additional information, refer to the resources listed below. Resource description Web address General HP BladeSystem information http://www.hp.com/go/bladesystem/ HP BladeSystem c7000 Site Planning Guide http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01 038153/c01038153.pdf HP BladeSystem c-Class documentation http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/316735-0-0-0121.html HP BladeSystem c-Class Enclosure Setup and Installation Guide http://h20000.www2.hp.