Double Density blades -

[Dave Cast]

Can someone explain to me what a double density blade actually is in real world terms (not typical HP doc-speak) - ?

Is it a full height blade?  Taking the bottom AND the top bays? or is it something else entirely - HP docs are clear as mud....

[Psychonaut]

The BL220 series is basically a 1/2 height split into two servers. The networking for the 1st "server" runs on interconnect 1&2 and the 2nd "server" runs on interconnects 3 & 4. It scales out to 32 servers per chassis. The best use case is if you need a lot of processors.

[Dave Cast]

Thanks for the response - so it's not a server (blade in this case) "partitioned" out as two entirely different servers w/ separate resoures and OS's ?

[Psychonaut]

It is a server "partitioned" out as two server with separate OS's and proc's. I'm not sure how the hard drives work - one per server? I have heard this is one of the lines that HP is thinking about discontinuing. Something to keep in mind as you research them.

[Torsten.]

Never seen such thing before, but according to the documentation there are 2 "small" independent servers in a half hight blade chassis.

[Bart_Heungens]

Hi,

These are effectively 2 independent servers in 1 half height blade case.

Some specs - per server (so 2 times all this in 1 half height case):

- up to 2 Xeon 55xx processors

- 6 DIMM sockets DDR3 so max 96GB

- 1 non hotplug SFF SATA or SSD drive

- 1 dual port NIC NC362i

- 1 I/O expansion mezzanine slot

- ILO2

Is indeed used in environments where alot of CPU's and memory is necessary... For instance HPC and Linux clusters...

If you send me a mail I can send some pictures from the inside and the front...

Kr,

Bart