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IBM Hardware

Build Your Own Blade Server 123

Posted by michael from the it-slices-it-dices dept.
fw3 writes "Information week is reporting that IBM and Intel are opening up the standards for the eServer BladeCenter. 'The companies will make available the design specifications for IBM's eServer BladeCenter product... hardware vendors can build "BladeCenter compatible" networking switches, blade adapter cards, and appliance and communications blades for enterprise networks.' Not really a new strategy for IBM, ISA of course was open from the start, IBM's technical references for the original PCs contained nearly all of the engineering data needed to build a PC. Looking further back I've been told by a reputable source that RCA was able to fully duplicate the System 360 System/360, mainframe working just a month behind IBM's own schedule by using IBM's published tech reports. (Of course IBM *didn't* share the details of OS/360, leaving RCA with a box but no OS.) See also stories from EETimes, CNN."
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Build Your Own Blade Server

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  • I would sure hate to be cat when the VPs read the heading I am sure something was kicked. Sun needs to read the writing on the wall, newspaper, toilet paper, everywhere - consumers are seeking alternatives from proprietary. Sun's Blade should have been the one in this heading yet they are happy chugging along while companies move forward. Sun is growing Dim.

    As for IBM and the RCA scandal, where is the OS/360 today. I wonder if it would have had deeper market penetration if IBM had extended the OS to RCA
    • Try running your OS/360 programs on your brand new zSeries box. Apparently they'll run fine. Of course in the mid-80s (2 decades after OS/360 appeared) IBM pretty much owned the mainframe market and most serious jobs needed a mainframe, so I don't think OS/360 did too badly.

    • Re:Wonder What Sun is Kicking (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eln ( 21727 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:16AM (#10139995)
      Sun spent far too long trying to be the anti-Microsoft, and failed to recognize the gains its actual competitors were making on its territory.

      Rather than McNealy trying to keep Microsoft from pushing big into the server market, maybe he should have been trying to keep up with the guys that were already entrenched in that market along with him, like IBM. Sure, you get more press from bashing Microsoft, but press doesn't pay the bills.

      It's sad to see how badly Sun has been damaged over the past few years. It used to be the unquestioned leader in quality server hardware and software, now it's in danger of becoming an also-ran in a market it used to own.
      • *It's sad to see how badly Sun has been damaged over the past few years. It used to be the unquestioned leader in quality server hardware and software, now it's in danger of becoming an also-ran in a market it used to own.*

        what's sad about competition? it would be sad if they were just the only player in their segment - making ok hardware/software but billing much more than what they're worth.
        • unquestioned leader in quality server hardware and software

          Unquestionable leader my arse. Last time I dealt with a Sun order of any significance was 3 years ago (and there is no fscking way in hell I will ever buy from them again after that). Out of 120+ 1U netras 10%+ were dead on arrival, 10% more dead within warranty. Even Hassans corner shop does better. That is besides the fact that ALI 1536 as a peripheral and IDE controller is NOT selfrespecting server hardware. It does not even qualify for a deskt

      • And Apple spent far too long trying to be anti-IBM. Strange how that worked out, isn't it? Both were so focused on one competitor that they got beaten by another.

    • Re:Wonder What Sun is Kicking (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lehk228 ( 705449 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:18AM (#10140025) Journal
      where is the OS/360 today

      It evolved into OS/370 than OS/390 (zSeries) and this line of systems is still sold today. Nice try but failing to sell the OS did not doom it to failure as your post implies.

    • Where is OS/360 today? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually OS/360 was "open source". In fact, it was never even copyrighted. I have the entire source on CD-ROM. Anybody can get it at http://www.cbttape.org.

      OS/360 had two flavors. MFT and MVT. MVT became SVS when it had virtual storage added on. MVS was in parallel development and once stable replaced SVS. Again, virtual storage. MVS was replaced by MVS/XA when the addressing scheme was changed from 24 bit to 31 bit. MVS/XA was replaced by MVS/ESA along with changes in the I/O architecture. MVS/ESA was rep

    • Re:Wonder What Sun is Kicking (Score:5, Informative)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @12:04PM (#10140605) Journal
      +4 interesting? More like -4 uninformative

      Sun needs to read the writing on the wall, newspaper, toilet paper, everywhere * consumers are seeking alternatives from proprietary.

      That is plain wrong. NFS isn't proprietry. SPARC is an ISO standard. Solaris runs on more than just SUN computers (ie Fujitsu ones as well, not mentioning Solaris/x86). As companies go, Sun is pretty un-proprietry and has been for quite a while.

      Why is bashing Sun so fasionable on /. these days. What the hell have htey done to deserve so much wrath?
      • Bashing Sun is fasionable on /. these days

        I bash Sun because I was forced to waste money on their products when upper managment would not go with Fujitsu, which offers better products.

        why didn't SPARC do beter I wonder, 'tis a shame

  • I'm suprised there's no Wesley Snipes tie-in with this product. It would seem natural.

    "Blades- the only thing between you, and the end of the world"

  • Great step towards compatibility (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CodeMaster ( 28069 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:06AM (#10139879)
    Just hope that HP and Sun follow lead and will make things a little easier.

    Thus far you could somehow mix'n'match components for standard servers (rack mountable or not), but blades were like hacking a SOHO router...

    Wonder how fast will the component manufacturers respond to this and start making parts available (i.e. - we will stop paying exuberant prices for replacement parts from the big guys...)

    get a free ipod! [freeipods.com] This really works... [iamit.org] 4 more GMail invites still available for signing up...

  • TCO (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Zorilla ( 791636 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:07AM (#10139886)
    Looks like mainframes could be getting cheaper if more companies get their hands on manufacturing them. Looks like Microsoft will have to find a different way to inflate the TCO of running Linux than the current strategy: running Windows 2003 Server on an e-Machine versus Linux on Giant Fucking Mainframe 7000 on the single processor kernel.
    • People tend to forget about Amdahl, which turned in Fujitsu, when thinking about OS/390.

      See this: http://www.ftsi.fujitsu.com/services/products/comp at/

  • Clone Blade Servers? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:07AM (#10139887)
    Well this does seem to open up a new market for clone blade servers, but I'm just not sure who would actually purchase one.

    Chances are, if you're going to be spending that kind of money on a server, you're probably going to want something from a reputed vendor, with good support, etc.
    • Remember when "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was the phrase of the day in purchasing departments everywhere when referring to PC purchases? Ever hear anyone use it today?
      • Yes, except now it's "Nobody ever got fired for buying Dell." Dude.

      • Re:Clone Blade Servers? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by crimoid ( 27373 )
        Many television stations still live by that mantra. They love their IBM equipment and are often willing to pay a large premium to keep everything IBM. I've had to come up with some pretty compelling reasons to even get them to CONSIDER anything but IBM.

    • Re:Clone Blade Servers? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MarcQuadra ( 129430 ) * on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:33AM (#10140226)
      But if the specs are open, there will be cool modules. Where I work we don't need a full blade of CPUs, and our 2TB storage could probably fit in the empty half of the bladecenter, so we could consolidate our entire server rack to one bladecenter, and save thousands monthly on cooling, electricity, and administration costs.

      IBM isn't going to make cool blade add-ons, other companies will. It'd be nice if Cisco had a 'direct to blade backplane' switch to the outside, Apple could make an XBlade, Sun could make one. You could pack all the stuff that used to need real estate into one big box.

      IBM already lets you mix-and-match PowerPC and x86 blades, the other vendors are going to (hopefully) add other cool functionality.
      • other vendors are going to (hopefully) add other cool functionality
        Indeed. One of the biggest stumbling blocks keeping blades from being more widely adopted is that up until now, every vendor had their own propriatary system. An industry standard blade architecture is going to really popularize the concept.

        • Re:Clone Blade Servers? (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Definitely. We were all ready to start a blade pilot program (with the IBM stuff, no less) when the CIO got a hold of a ComputerWeek/InfoWeek/whatever article/report that said the proprietary nature of blade servers "made them a bad choice over 1Us" and that "better stuff is on the horizon"...

          It'll be nice to be able to go to the meeting and say "Yep, boss, you were right, better stuff IS coming, but guess what, we were right too: Its the blade server standard from IBM."
      • Apple could make an XBlade
        Don't you mean an iBlade?
      • Calling it a standard doesn't make it one. IBM needs to be working through a non-profit standards based organization. Until then, this is NOTHING but hype.
    • Blades are ideal for any kind of "farm" operation -- web farm, render farm, beowulf cluster, etc. They let you pack a lot more machines into a single rack and consolidate a lot of redundant components. You can get 12+ blades in a 6U chassis, whereas the best you could do with a traditional servers is 6 1U boxen.
    • Home network from a central location? Small businesses? Support is good, but often un-needed.
    • *Chances are, if you're going to be spending that kind of money on a server, you're probably going to want something from a reputed vendor, with good support, etc*

      well, could be useful still for 'home built' clusters. at least more useful than using full towers or expensive rack cases..

      besides, your reputed vendor could be some business that would buy from these new bulk vendors..

    • I think the greater point is that, with a flood of manufacturers and developers, the costs would drop enough to allow a lot of small and medium businesses to consider buying them for the flexibility of rapidly growing them in the future.

  • History repeating (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1. IBM has an open architecture like the PC
    2. IBM has someone else (in this case Novell/Redhat) do their OS.
    3. Lots of clones make a big market.
    4. IBM Out-executes them all AGAIN- Profit

    • Re:History repeating (Score:4, Insightful)

      by lucabrasi999 ( 585141 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:19AM (#10140038) Journal

      I don't know about history repeating. IBM almost went out of business because they had a gross miscalculation on the popularity of the PC. Well, that may not have been the only reason IBM almost went under, but it was one of the key reasons.

      It took IBM almost a decade to recover from it's miscalculation to be at the point where it was able to out-execute anyone.

      • Re:History repeating - MCA (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I think your talking about the MicroChannel architecture(MCA) in the early PS/2 series while much of the rest of the industry pushed E-ISA and later PCI. The telling thing to me was that at the time E-ISA came out an issue of Byte magazine ran a tech article that talked about everyting from signal timeing in the bus on up while an article (another month) about MCA talked about it being a "16-lane superhiway in you PC". IBM was all about propritary hardware at the time.
    • ibm out-executed clone manufacturers?

      woah.. I must have woken up in the wrong reality.

  • IBM's technical references for the original PCs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Threni ( 635302 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:09AM (#10139913)
    > IBM's technical references for the original PCs contained nearly all of the
    > engineering data needed to build a PC

    Yeah, after plenty of legal action!

  • BIOS. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Armchair Dissident ( 557503 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:14AM (#10139966)
    IBM's technical references for the original PCs contained nearly all of the engineering data needed to build a PC.

    Except for one of the key components to make a PC: the "Build your own BIOS" reference.

    • Re:BIOS. (Score:3, Informative)

      by mohearn ( 693777 )
      Except for one of the key components to make a PC: the "Build your own BIOS" reference.

      IBM included the BIOS source code in the technical references.

    • Re:BIOS. (Score:4, Informative)

      by red floyd ( 220712 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:30AM (#10140174)
      It had the entire friggin' BIOS listing!

  • Control of open standards (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:25AM (#10140124)
    Not really a new strategy for IBM, ISA of course was open from the start, IBM's technical references for the original PCs contained nearly all of the engineering data needed to build a PC. Looking further back I've been told by a reputable source that RCA was able to fully duplicate the System 360 System/360, mainframe working just a month behind IBM's own schedule by using IBM's published tech reports. (Of course IBM *didn't* share the details of OS/360, leaving RCA with a box but no OS.)

    This was probably the same model they had in mind for the PC. They wanted to use commodity hardware and even encourage clone makers because they knew that would help allow them to match hardware prices of other high-volume competitors. They figured that they would maintain control of the platform through their proprietary BIOS, and that any clone manufacturers would have to license the BIOS from IBM.

    Software vendors would write to the BIOS calls, and IBM would command a position akin to the present-day Microsoft, where they would be the arbiter of the standard interface between application software and hardware. That may explain why they outsourced the DOS OS to Microsoft; they may have thought of it as just a layer over the BIOS. They knew that versions of DOS that ran over other low-level APIs (of which there were a few examples) wouldn't be quite compatible enough to become popular, so they didn't bother to get exclusive control of DOS.

    Unfortunately for IBM, the BIOS wasn't that hard to reverse engineer in a clean room environment, clones of the BIOS enabled Microsoft to sell 100% compatible versions of DOS to anyone, and the rest was history.

    I guess the lesson to be learned is that if you're going to use software to maintain control over a commodity hardware market, make sure that the software is too crufty and complex to reverse engineer in a reasonable amount of time.

    • I guess the lesson to be learned is that if you're going to use software to maintain control over a commodity hardware market, make sure that the software is too crufty and complex to reverse engineer in a reasonable amount of time.

      Let me get this straight, you're telling people to use Windows if they want to stay in control?
      • Let me get this straight, you're telling people to use Windows if they want to stay in control?

        You stay in control by selling complex and ever-changing software. So to use Windows for this purpose, you would first have to somehow buy the Windows source code and copyrights from Microsoft.


    • Except, IBM never licensed the BIOS, or even offered it for license as far as I know. And in fact IBM got out of the PC business all together for a few years when it realized it had hopelessly lost the monopoly to the likes of Compaq, et al. But that was when IBM was a hardware company. Today IBM, the services company, is much more amenable to open standards.

  • screwed again? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:33AM (#10140220) Homepage Journal
    The IBM PC-AT spec opened the door to the commodity "PC" industry. The spec was detailed, and useful, enough for cloners to copy the PC, and the power of competition to drive the vast deployment of cheap PC hardware worldwide. Spawning not only Microsoft and Linux, but the Internet as we (think we) know it today. Especially in light of the obstacles to innovation domino effect we have today, like business process patents, domain name squatting, and every other "legal engineering" trick, IBM's PC-AT spec publication was a work of technology heroism.

    But of course, every silver lining has its cloud. For example, the PC-AT spec didn't specify exactly where the motherboard screw holes must appear. So not only were there incompatible motherboard/chassis combinations, but the kluges to accomodate the differences made many cheap boxes significantly more expensive for manufacturers on a volume basis. Just an example of how the 80% solution can spawn its own problems, that require 80% more time to solve. Let's hope we've learned from the last watershed spec publication, and get all the details in the new blade server specs. Especially if we're all going to use them.
  • One of the first clunkers I learned to program on... The 7.5 MB harddrives were made by Fujitsu!

    When it left, it went from Michigan to Georgia, then on boat to Taiwan, where it's probably polluting groundwater to this day.

    IIRC RCA wasn't the only company to mimic IBM's systems as I thought that was the business model for Amdahl.

  • facinating.
    This should make it somewhat easier to build a Blade computer, hence, it would appear that IBM Blade-compatible appearing on Blade servers for the next 5 years is the goal.

  • IBM isn't that nice. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by k98sven ( 324383 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @11:43AM (#10140335) Journal
    IBM has historically been a friend of open hardware standards?

    If they're trying to make that point.. well, it's just historical revisionism.

    Yes, ISA was open. That's why IBM tried to push the MicroChannel bus architecture.

    As for mainframes.. IBM invented what we now call FUD to battle Honeywell and Amdahl and the like.

    And I'd like to see someone try and build a mainframe clone today. IBM has some seriously secret stuff in those boxes. My father is a mainframe veteran, and he knows some of this stuff. He can't say what, though, because he's under an NDA.

    So if you're trying to float the idea that IBM builds hardware to open specifications and always has.. you're just wrong.

  • Build your own blades. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've built some very dense blades (for off the self hardware) and for very CHEAP money. I need to see better blades. I could produce a 2 amd system in a 1u, which is great for high cpu hosting (like online gaming).

    In the end I found it cheaper to just rent servers, and let the isp worry about the space. But if I owned a datacenter, I would be building my own racks.

    open the specs, lets get back to building render farms.
  • If this is the one I'm thinking of, RCA's machine (somewhere along the line) was called the "Spectra 70". They wrote their own OS, designed around time sharing terminal users, vs. the batch design of OS/360. The New York City Board of Higher Education had one back in the early 70's, when I was a CS student. It used the same instruction set, but the one I used had unique extensions for virtual memory, so the software wasn't cross-compatible. I think I still have a manual for it around somewhere.

    OS/360 b
    • No, Amdahl turned into (not sure if they were bought out, but try going to ahdahl.com) Fujitsu, and they still make os/390 stuff. Check it out here: http://www.ftsi.fujitsu.com/services/products/comp at/

  • ...they open up the specs for creating viruses and spreading them onto the Internet.

    Oh... wait...
  • I've been told by a reputable source that RCA was able to fully duplicate the System 360 System/360, mainframe working just a month behind IBM's own schedule by using IBM's published tech reports.

    Sony tried to copy the IBM [seds.org] PS [seds.org]/2 [digidome.nl] using the same principles it just took them 14 years.

    Heck of an improvement though...
  • I learned how to program computers on one of these dinosaurs when I was in high school. It was a IBM System/360 clone without the reliability of a real IBM system. It supported TOS (Tape Operating System) and DOS (Disk Operating System). The school board bought one system and put a teletype and dataphone (110 bps modem) in each high school. It supported RPG, COBOL, Dartmouth BASIC and Waterloo FORTRAN. It wasn't a bad system if you ignored the fact that its MTBF was about 1 hour.
    • If you remember it too, then I must have been close to right in my previous comment. Their time sharing OS was called "TSOS", IIRC. We used teletypes via phone lines to connect. Unlike OS/360, where everything resembled a batch job, under TSOS everything resembled an interactive session. OS/360 had "JOB cards", TSOS had "LOGIN" cards. Completely different philosophy. Working on both at the same time was amusing. The one at NYC BHE was fairly reliable. They used it to do most of their bookkeeping, pa
  • They shared OS/360 with everyone at the same time. OS/360 wasn't copyrighted, and was distributed in source form - in fact, to install it, you had to start with a small pregenerated system and completely assemble everything from the ground up. OS/360 was open source when open source wasn't cool - it was just the way everybody did things.

    The RCA "compatible" mainframe was compatible only at the problem program level. OS programs (supervisor state code) were markedly different because the I/O subsystem wasn'

  • If you have used the IBM blade frame, (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you have used the IBM blade frame, i really wouldn't understand why anyone would want to copy it. I have never seen such downtime. Posting as an anonymmous coward so that my employeer doesn't fire me.
  • this [slashdot.org] is my blade server.
  • The money we would have spent with lawyers we can now invest in our product."

    'nough said.

    AIK

  • IBM *was* Open Source - Both Hardware and Software (Score:4, Informative)

    by McLuhanesque ( 176628 ) on Thursday September 02, 2004 @03:14PM (#10142648) Homepage
    Back in the mainframe days - which is when I got my start in the biz - OS/360 and OS/370 (up to OS/MVS V7) were open source. The source was distributed on microfiche, and system programmers were encouraged to modify the code to make the whole thing run better. There was a user organization called the Society to Help Avoid Redundant Effort (SHARE) at which system programmers shared their code modifications with each other, and with the IBM developers. Some of the good stuff made its way back into the standard "distro" - although we didn't call it that back then.

    Similarly, the hardware diagrams were standard manuals that existed in every datacentre. I remember browsing through them shortly after I finished school (a hundred years ago or so) and thinking, "there really isn't much to these mainframe computers; nothing much more than the final exam in electronics." But based on those diagrams, and other info, our datacentre was the first in the world to put the 9th megabyte on an S 370/168!

    And yes, at the time, I did get questioned about how on earth we could have so much work that we needed a 9th megabyte on a 168.

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