HP has announced the G7 generation of servers. There seems to be 3 models to start with, all Opteron based. I’m looking at a video for the DL 385 G7. Wow! It takes up to 2 * 12 Core Opteron processors, 12MB L3 cache, with 4 channels of DDR3 memory. You get double the RAM capacity and 66% throughput compared to the same G6 machine. 24 Dimms with 256GB total capacity. You have the choice of the usual ECC RAM, cheaper unbuffered RAM and low power RAM. There are 4 NIC’s built into it – aimed squarely at, but hardly limited to, virtualisation.
The cheaper RAM might be an option for clustered virtualisation were power reduction isn’t the primary goal. Board fails? OK – the VM fails over to another host.
New storage controllers with battery and flash backed caches are included. There is an extra PCIx slot giving you 6 generation 2 slots.
An SD card reader is built in, handy for OEM provided ESXi or Hyper-V Server installations that boot from a card. Interesting – HP always used to use Compact Flash.
ILO3 promises much better (3 times faster) remote administration. The big flaw in ILO2 was remote media. That’s improved now. You can script power usage for low power (UPS) scenarios. There is also a power measurement feature now.
There are 8 built in SFF slots. You can add another cage to have a total of 16. Instead of 8 SFF, you can use 6 LFF disks (larger capacities).
That’s a very impressive 2U server!
A DL165 G7 (1U) and SL165z G7 were also announced. The DL165 G7 has 4 NIC’s and 24 DIMM slots for traditional and virtualization server computing. Some of the other metrics are the same as above. The SL165z G7 is for extreme scale out computing and constrained spaces. It’s a cross between rack and blade servers. It appears to be of a similar spec to the DL165 G7.