C-Class Minimum Hardware - Fans & Power

[Dave Thomson]

Hello

What is the minimum amount of fans needed in a 16 Blade C-Class chassis. And how many power supplies would be needed. Is there documentation concerning this ? I cannot seem to find any.

Thanks

[Adrian Clint · Accepted solution]

Dave,

The minimum recommended is 6 Fans, they seem to recommend that you use 10 fans for 16 blades but for 8 full height you can probably be ok with 8. Are you registered for CertPro? You can download a c-Class c7000 training training kit that covers this in much more detail?

As for the power supplies - a rough calculation. Assume average of 250-300watt per half height blade. You can get a more accurate figure for this by using the configurator tool.
Assume 2250watt delivered per power supply.

So if you have 10 blades - call it 3000 watts then you can have 2 PSU's at 1500 watts each. If you are running N+N redundancy then you will need 4 PSU's and if you want N+1 then 3 PSUs.

If you turn on power saving for the PSUs then the 3rd and 4th PSUs will not turn on till you lose either 1st or 2nd or both. If power saving mode is on the enclosure will not turn on a PSU till the existing PSUs are running at over 80% power.

With 16 blades you could use for example 4200watts. This would mean you only need 4 PSUs running at 1050 each, you need 4 PSUs as the 3rd & 4th would turn on when 1 and 2 hit over 1800 watts (80% of 2250). But even if you lost a feed to two PSU's they would both still pull 2100 which is 94% of full load.

[Dave Thomson]

Hi Andrian

Im registered with cerpro. Could you possably send me the link to that documentation, i cant find it on the site.

Im booked up for the C-Class training from Monday - Thursday next week. It would help a great deal if i could read the docs before hand and not sound too much like a boob at the course.

Thanks

[Adrian Clint]

Dave

How I get there.

Goto Smartportal and login
http://certification.portal.emea.hp.com/WelcomePage.asp

Click on Smartlearning (Top left)

Click on Training Catalog (Middle left)

Click the + on Servers and Systems (Right)

Click the + on Blade Servers (Right)

Scroll down till you get to "HP ProLiant c-Class BladeSystem Web Based Training "
Register and Download, you may find you have to start the training online before you can download it.
Look at all the other Web Based Training and Recorded sessions in there on all the blade servers RDP and SIM etc

Also Click the Proliant Servers link further down after Blade Servers for even more downloadable training.