back to article HP slips out ProLiant DL560 Gen8 four-socketeer

While Hewlett-Packard has not yet formally announced any ProLiant servers based on Intel's Xeon E5-4600 processors for four-socket boxes, we knew from SPEC CPU benchmark tests that a blade called the BL660c Gen8 is on the way. And now we know a DL560 Gen8 rack-mounted box is in the works, too, with the machine on sale in the US …

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  1. _Absinthe_
    Stop

    Err, know the industry much? Or just getting paid by HP?

    "The server has five 2.5-ich drive bays... ...you can't expect more than that in a 2U rack form factor"

    The Dell R820, has SIXTEEN 2.5" drive bays!? That is also a 2U 4-socket box with otherwise very similar specs to this DL560 Gen8 (well, the Dell's got an extra PCIe slot, but hey ho).

    If we're looking at the Dell R720xd however, which is a 2U, 2-socket box, that one has TWENTY-SIX 2.5" drive bays, and they're ALL hot-pluggable.

    I won't even start on the rest of the article.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Err, know the industry much? Or just getting paid by Dell?

      Great for Dell that they offer that many drive slots. In my experience this is as useless as it gets for a server in this class as it's usually connected to external storage anyways.

      Instead Dell better had put more work in other areas like iDRAC (iDRAC 7 can barely hold up to iLO3, and forget about iLO4 in the Gen8 HP servers), their awful and bug-ridden management tools, and their documentation.

    2. lset

      Re: Err, know the industry much? Or just getting paid by HP?

      Personally I would rather have hardly any local storage and know that I had some decent cooling going through a 2U box that had 4 procs in it. Maybe that's just my personal preference though. For something as dense as this, surely you will be hooking this up to some form of external storage anyway.

      Also your comment about the PCI-e slots is misleading. The 7th slot in the R820 is used for the RAID controller, HP already has their controller built onto the motherboard. In effect they both have 6 usable slots for HBAs, NICs etc. but like you said, hey ho.

    3. Pondule
      FAIL

      Re: Err, know the industry much? Or just getting paid by HP?

      The Dell doesn't support 16 disks with top performing CPUs, try their web configurator and you get this error:-

      If 4 x 130W CPUs is selected then the HDD's is limited to a max of "8" and must have "2 x 1100 PSU"

  2. Michael Duke
    WTF?

    So HP have a DL380 Gen8 that supports 25SFF hot plug drives as well.

    If you are talking about a 4 proc, 32 core, 64 thread machine it is either a grunty application server with no need for lots of storage, a database server that will be connected to some sort of external storage or a virtual host which again will be connected to external storage.

    I do not see 5 local drives bays as being a limitation on this class of server.

  3. localzuk Silver badge

    Storage

    In the age of unified storage and SANs, combined with 10GbE or Infiniband, why would you need lots of local storage anyway? If you're processing lots of data locally, you really want that loaded into RAM not on a local disk.

  4. Davidoff
    Holmes

    @author: there's room for improvement

    I enjoy reading articles which discuss new server models (which is rare enough, the articles not the servers) but the article doesn't really show that the author really know much about the stuff he's writing about. Two examples:

    "The machine comes with two processors standard, but if you want the full memory addressability of the system and the full I/O capability, you need all four processors to be plugged in because the memory controllers and PCI-Express 3.0 controllers are on the die, not on the mobo. This is exactly the case with all Xeon E5-4600 machines, not just those made by HP."

    Well, since it's unsurprisingly not just the case for HP XEON E5-4800 machines, the author may have wanted to use the industry-known term for that: it's called 'NUMA' (Non-Uniform Memory Architecture, each CPU has its own local memory). And this is nothing new for the XEON E5-4800, the 2-socket variant (E5-2000) is NUMA as well as are it's predecessors (XEON 5500/5600 series). As are all AMD multiprocessor Opterons since the beginning of time btw.

    "The system has an embedded Smart Array P420i/ZM RAID 0 and 1 disk controller, which can be upgraded with models with 1GB or 2GB of write cache and RAID 5 support."

    Yes, the P420i can be upgraded with FBWC memory modules which add RAID 5 capability. However, it may be worth mentioning that via an Smart Array Advanced license RAID 6/ADG can be added as well, aside from unlocking further functionality.

    As a final note, HP puts out detailed spec sheets (called 'quickspecs' in HP speak) for most of its business products, and a search for them on Google helps to avoid to copy little and often incomplete and incorrect information from the HP homepage.

    1. Pondule

      Re: @author: there's room for improvement

      Huzzah for quickspecs, but they weren't out publically when article was written.

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