Recently I attended the HP ROK road show. ROK is aimed at keeping vendors abreast of up coming changes in the HP product line. The show I attended focused on server hardware. As we move into 2009 the new G6 range of servers will be released. The G6 range will introduce new hardware technologies that leverage the features in Windows Server 2008.
Solid State Drives (SSD) will be introduced as the boot drive. SSD drives have no moving parts. They are a little like a USB stick on steroids and offer faster response times than traditional mechanical drives. With no moving parts they also have the expectation of fewer failures. There is however an issue with SSD drives; they have restrictions around how many times a single location on the drive can be written to. Currently you can get only 5000 writes to a single location. By the time these appear in servers that should be 100’000 writes. Server 2008 natively understands this restriction with SSD drives and randomises data writes across the drive rather than always using the first available location.
300GB 2.5 inch drives. The laws of physics have been causing hardware developers issues when it comes to reducing the size of mechanical hard drives. Many new servers have supported the smaller 2.5 inch hard drives. This smaller form size allows for more drives to be used in a smaller space. Up to now however the largest capacity drive in this range has been 140GB. 300GB drives will appear early in 2009. Larger 2.5 inch drives are planned but with no ETA as yet. Meanwhile the traditional 3.5 inch drives will be coming out with a 1.5TB capacity.
10GB Network Cards will become standard in servers. At this point 10GB switches are still expensive. Past trends however suggest that with in a year or two we will see the price dropping and 10GB speed becoming the standard.
Smaller Blades. Two major moves in Blade servers will be around the number of servers in a blade chassis and the introduction of Blade hard drives. Smaller CPUs have allowed HP to take a single blade slot and insert to servers into that slot. Owners of the current 3000 and 7000 blades will be doubling the number of servers in the blade chassis. Currently Blade hard drives are attached to the blade server in separate chassis; this will change with drives being inserted directly into the blade chassis itself.
RDX “removable disk backup”. This is hot subject with many in the industry predicting it will replace tapes. The idea here is that you have two external hard drives one of which you take off site each night. The backup alternates between the two drives. When a disk is first inserted it does a full back up and from there forward only backs up changes to that disk. These are good for bare metal recovery. There are issues however. Currently the largest size you can get is 360GB. That means you would not get many additional changes onto that drive before it would need to start over again. This is not helpful if what you need is to restore something from 2 weeks ago. Removable disks have been around for some time. In the past the issue has been around failures, they have not travelled well. I have yet to be convinced on the longevity of this technology compared to tapes.
HP POD. This is exciting stuff. The HP POD is delivered to your door as a 40 foot container. You plug it into your network, air con and power (warning it does not take a standard 3 pin plug). The POD holds 12000 hard drives and computing equal to 3000+ computers. If you have a need for a POD call me direct as I can get you a discount off the list price.
Bill Lunam
Operations Manager, Kinetics Group, 021 606 268
http://www.kinetics.co.nz