Tatung's New Dual Processor Blade Servers Support up to 200 AMD Opteron Processors Per Rack

Business Wire, Nov 1, 2004

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- New server features high performance and high availability, with systems management built-in; all with low power consumption

Tatung Company is introducing a new 64-bit capable ultra-dense blade server that accommodates up to 10 independent dual processor server blades in a single 4U form factor chassis. Data centers and other high-performance applications achieve substantial total cost of ownership (TCO) savings with the new system's high performance, high density, built-in manageability and significant savings in power consumption. The TUD-4010OP features integrated switch blades, management blades, and server blades that support up to 200 AMD Opteron(TM) processors per standard 42U rack. Completely modular, with hot-swappable components including multiple server blades, redundant Ethernet switch blades, management blades, power supplies and fan modules, the system offers built-in high availability and ease of service and maintenance.

AMD Opteron(TM) Processors Provide High Performance and Investment Protection

In a single 4U rack-mountable chassis, the TUD-4010OP can accommodate up to 10 server blades, two switch blades, two management blades with failover capability, 3 1 redundant power supplies and two high-performance fan modules. Each server blade can be configured with dual low-power consumption AMD Opteron processors HE Model 246, up to 8 GB of ECC registered DDR266/DDR333 memory (four DIMM slots); up to two IDE 2.5-inch hard disk drives; dual 1 GB Ethernet connected to two switch blades; video controllers with VGA and SVGA resolutions and support for USB CD-ROM and FDD; plus one low-profile PCI-X slot for various add-on cards options such as infiniband, FCAL, iSCSI, and gigabit Ethernet and other IO options. Components are hot-swappable with each blade featuring activity indicator LEDs for the CPU, primary and secondary networks and HDD. The TUD-4010OP blade server supports Windows(R) 2000, Windows(R) Server 2003 and Linux operating systems.

"AMD Opteron processors allow Tatung to offer a family of blade servers, including the new TUD 4010OP, in which users can take advantage of 32- and 64-bit computing for their applications and operating systems, while providing optimized memory performance, balanced throughput, expandable I/O, and more linear symmetrical multiprocessing," according to Dr. Kam Chan, president of Tatung Science and Technology, Inc. (TSTI), a U.S. subsidiary of the multi-national Tatung Company. "Additionally, customers can realize more efficient processing power, while lowering power usage and heat dissipation. These servers are scalable and configurable to satisfy demanding requirements for scientific, engineering, Internet, e-commerce and data center applications."

Scalable for High-Volume Deployments

While the TUD-4010OP integrates 10 server blades in a 4U chassis, allowing up to 200 AMD Opteron processors in a single 42U height rack, the effective density is even higher. The system includes dual Gigabit Ethernet switches and dual management blades, each of which would normally consume an additional 1U of rack space. Each server blade is equipped with power saving AMD Opteron processors HE Model 246. These power- and space-saving efficiencies provide direct cost savings to the data center. Further savings are achieved through the reduced air conditioning, UPS and backup power requirements.

The AMD Opteron processor's Direct Connect Architecture provides enhancements that deliver world-class performance in single and dual processor applications, such as those employed in the Tatung servers. Direct Connect Architecture means that everything is directly connected to the CPU including an integrated memory controller and 1MB of L2 cache. Additionally, HyperTransport(TM) technology provides a scalable bandwidth interconnect between processors, I/O subsystems, and other chipsets. The AMD Opteron processors also include 64-bit-wide key data and address paths that incorporate a 48-bit virtual address space and a 40-bit physical address space, allowing end users to run their existing installed base of 32-bit applications and operating systems at peak performance, while providing a migration path that is 64-bit capable.

"Tatung's new family of AMD Opteron processor-based blade servers offers compelling performance benefits to high-performance computing customers who are looking for scalable, reliable and energy efficient server solutions," said Ben Williams, vice president of enterprise and server/workstation business at AMD. "The AMD Opteron processor's Direct Connect Architecture, which diminishes processing bottlenecks and memory latency, will help these new blades from Tatung deliver industry-leading performance on either 32- or 64-bit HPC applications."

Integrated Management Blades and Software Automate Provisioning, Monitoring and Management of Servers

ManageSite(tm) software from Amphus is fully integrated with the TUD-4010OP. It interfaces with the management blade to provide policy-based automated provisioning and hardware monitoring. The integrated software and management blade allows remote management of the blade servers, lights-out and out-of-band management of the server blades and automatic switch-over for high availability. Internal AMPC serial channel communication controllers monitor voltage, temperature, speed of each blade and module, and offer the ability to cycle power, shut-down and reset any module.