topic Re: BL465c Gen9 ???? in BladeSystem - General

BL465c Gen9 ????

MichelPhilips — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 07:11:13 GMT

Hello,

Is any official information available on Gen9 blades with an AMD processor, for the BL465 range ?

All I can find on Gen9 are Intel processor based blades, but no infor on AMD ones.

Will there even be a Gen9 for AMD blades ?

Thanks.

Re: BL465c Gen9 ????

Rebecca Taylor — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 18:55:20 GMT

Currently, there is no plan for a new AMD based platform on BladeSystem. That is not to say it will never happen, but nothing on the visible roadmap.

Re: BL465c Gen9 ????

sgunelius — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 12:54:48 GMT

Was there any particular reason for choosing AMD over Intel? I had originally done so with Gen8 because the core density was higher on BL465c than BL460c and that provided a larger pool of pCPU for my vSphere hosts, but the latest BL460c Gen9 has up to 18-core processors now.

Re: BL465c Gen9 ????

Torsten. — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 13:19:27 GMT

up to 22 cores now per processor.

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant-servers/product-detail.html?oid=7271227#!tab=specs

Re: BL465c Gen9 ????

sgunelius — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 13:41:28 GMT

Torsten,

Thanks, I hadn't updated my Product Bulletin and didn't know they'd now included 20 and 22-core. Now I'm just waiting for the 128GB LRDIMMs to become available this summer, though the price on the 64GB LRDIMMs has recently dropped significantly.

Scott

Re: BL465c Gen9 ????

Mike O. — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 14:59:19 GMT

For us, originally ( 6 years back), AMD was chosen because of the lower cost and the higher core counts. Even though Intel now has comparable CPU cores, the Intel cost is still higher per blade.

We could deal with the increased cost per blade for the occasional expansion of our environment, but since we can't mix AMD and Intel in the same VMWare cluster, to switch to Intel we'd have to purchase about 30 Intel blades all at once to get our existing cluster over. Half a million $$ just to keep us at the same server count wasn't in the 2016 budget.

Hopefully the new AMD ZEN processors that are supposed to be out later this year (maybe in "465 G10"?) will bring AMD back in to the mix. It not, we may be looking at that $500K Intel migration in 2017 budget...

Re: BL465c Gen9 ????

Ken Krubsack — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 12:51:00 GMT

We went with AMD when they first came out and stayed with them through the Gen8's, except for a few DB apps that we needed lower core counts to keep licensing costs reasonable (read: Oracle and DB2). Intel offered 4 core CPUs, and the lowest AMD would go was either 6 or 8.

We tested the Intel Gen9's and the performance difference was amazing. We've gone to the Intel Gen9's, and decided the cleanest thing to do was start up a new VM 6 environment. Yeah, we had to do cold mogrations oduring maintenance windows, but it was worth it. We're packing more VMs onto fewer hosts (admittedly with more memory than the old ones).

Re: BL465c Gen9 ????

Mike O. — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 15:30:19 GMT

We had the same situation, our 5 blade "oracle" cluster is running on Intel due to the licensing and having to keep smaller core counts.

Our biggest issue with switching to Intel now would be the initial cost. We have about 30 AMD blades, each with dual 16 core CPU's and 256GB of RAM. Even if we didn't replace all 30, we'd still have to replace most of them to give us high availability, and getting through a several hundred dollar unbudgeted purchase is not too likely to happen, especially since we're not having any issues at the time.

If the new AMD blade aren't released (or end up being a flop), we'll probably plan on migrating to Intel next year.