No more hiding in the server room

Guide to Compaq Servers?

I'm from a Dell shop, and we've been looking for some higher-core machines to do some heavy maths on. I browsed at HP's Proliant selection, and I saw that they had an 8 socket machine available that took 6-core AMD processors. That's hot.

My problem is that I'm trying to look around HP's server selection, and it's like a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Is there some kind of simple guide as to what server branding is for what? I've accidentally found HPUX servers, and I didn't even realize that those were still around!

Can anyone lend me a hand, or a map to the HP server names? Thanks!

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Isaac on October 3, 2009 at 5:02am

I'm not sure if this what your looking for or not but the the Proliant boxes are divided into 3 groups; ML servers are cheap branch office boxes (or other light duty), DL are your typical rack mount boxes and last you have the BL series which are blades. I'm assuming your looking for a DL probably the DL700 by your description.

There are other servers product lines besides Proliant for instance the Integrity line but those are not x64 boxes. The Integrity boxes are Itanium and HP still has links to their Alpha, e3000 and PA-RISC machines even though these are all EOL and/or EOS.

Your right that HP's site is abysmal and typically I've need to call a rep to get a clear picture regarding config options and pricing. Incidentally if do go for an HP box make sure you get the Advanced iLO license.

So your surprised that HP is still selling HP-UX? That's nothing ... HP still sells ... wait for it ... OpenVMS!!!

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on October 4, 2009 at 12:33am

Thanks, Issac! That does help clear it up a little bit, and I'm glad that I'm not the only one who gets a little bit confused. I've sent a couple of links to my boss, who is taking care of this purchase. He had been looking at a Dell Poweredge with a maximum of 24 cores. The 48 core machine is a considerable step up, and it's possible that once we talk to the sales reps, we can do even better.

And wow, OpenVMS? Yikes.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Isaac on October 4, 2009 at 5:07am

Interestingly back before HP bought Compaq I found buying HP’s x86 servers (their Netserver line) on their website easy while buying Compaq Proliants was a pain. After the buyout they rebranded the Compaq site to for HP and it’s still a pain to this day. The nice HP Netserver site got dumped.

I really wish that HP (and other vendors for that matter) would move away from just updating the revision level of a model; i.e. the DL380 wasn’t replaced by a DL381 or whatever it was replaced by the DL380 G2. So now, years later, we are up to the DL380 G6. Are eventually going to get a DL380 G169?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Julian Regel on October 3, 2009 at 10:26pm

Matt

Not wanting to confuse things for you, but I'd suggest looking at Sun x64 servers as well - they have some pretty powerful models too (though not sure they have 48 cores). I wouldn't expect to pay anything like list price though...

Of course, unless you have specific processing needs where you absolutely must have a single box with masses of CPU, I'd get a blade and stuff it full of modules with fewer CPUs. At least that way failure of one module doesn't bring your entire workload down.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on October 4, 2009 at 12:37am

Hi Jullian, thanks for the tip! I haven't considered Sun, just because I have this mental image of them being A) expensive, and B) weird. I know that B doesn't make sense, but it's just my built in unfamiliarity with the hardware vendor. To be honest, Compaq strikes me as sort of weird too.

Eh, I just need to expand my horizons, right?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Isaac on October 4, 2009 at 5:17am

I’m certainly fond of Sun gear but if the goal is max number of cores in an x64 box then the HP DL785 with 48 (8 x 6) AMD cores is the clear choice. Outside of x64 then Sun does much higher then 48 cores ... the M9000 goes to 256 cores or 256 threads on the T5440 if your app is highly muti-threaded.

Sun’s X4600 M2 is very similar to the DL785 as they are both 8 socket AMD Opteron boxes with a max of 512GB RAM. The X4600 M2 has the advantage of being only 4U vs. 7U for the DL785 but the DL785 has more room for internal disks then the Sun box. Sun is shipping 6 core Opterons in their smaller AMD servers so presumably the X4600 will have a M3 revision that offers 6 core CPUs but I really couldn’t say.

I played with pricing out 4core based boxes on the HP and Sun websites and I found the pricing comparable. Sun has been very expensive in the past but these days I find them comparable to other tier1 vendors. We are almost completely a Sun shop here and if I thought that I could save considerable amounts of money with another vendor then we would.

As for your B; in the past Sun machines were highly proprietary. These days however they primarily use standard components and technologies. The x64 machines are pretty much the same as servers from IBM, HP or Dell. They have a x86 BIOS like anything else, they use SAS drives like anything else, they have PCIe slots like everyone else, etc … Even the SPARC boxes aren’t all that different anymore because while they use OpenFirmware and have SPARC chips instead of x64 (duh) they otherwise are pretty typical on the low-end. On the high-end you have more interesting and exotic machines that have hotswap RAM and CPUs and can do dynamic reconfiguration and hard system hardware partitions. Again in the past Sun machines had custom busses (SBUS for instance) but now they just use PCIe. Kind of sad really; I’m quite the hardware junkie and I always loved big unique servers.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Benjamin Krueger on October 4, 2009 at 3:29am

One of the best features of working with Sun is that you can often get them to send you a test box so you can evaluate whether the hardware will actually be appropriate for your application. How "duh, why doesn't everyone do this" is that?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Joshua Penix on October 5, 2009 at 2:55pm

One of the things I find most useful when shopping HP hardware is their "QuickSpecs" document. Once you have a particular server line in mind, the QuickSpecs doc is your decoder ring to the technical details like possible RAM configurations, all the prebuilt models available, and every option along with part numbers. Here's the index of docs for all ProLiant servers, and an example for the DL785 G6 hardware.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Andrew Rogers on October 6, 2009 at 7:31pm

If you're sticking with HP for a bit, you might want to find a reputable distributor. They'll have access to the HP SalesBuilder tool (something you can get if you run a couple of online tests to become a HP partner I believe) which lets them build a machine to your specific requirements.

Personally, I'm a Dell guy, the HP equipment we get always seems to have way more issues than the Dell stuff we receive..