“Take something like the Rich Creek 2 notebook form factor,” he says. “That’s making a product better, sure. But you have pedestal servers, rack servers, blade servers. Now we’ve taken all that, made it more modular, more simple and flexible, and now you have Modular Server. It’s a whole new product category. It’s huge! It deserves its own Wikipedia page!”

IBM’s BladeCenter has a Wikipedia page, so why not?

Hyperbole aside, yes, the Modular Server is a new category worth a lot of attention, and we’ll review why in a moment. But more importantly, eight months into the product’s life, some new features and partnerships have emerged that could prove to be very significant for SMB resellers.

Modular Server Storage
In case you missed our other coverage, here are the basics on Modular Server’s storage system. Traditional blade design places hard drive storage along with a motherboard and CPUs in a slide-out tray apparatus called a blade. The blade and its contents connect to a backplane that supplies power and networking connectivity to each blade within its enclosure. Because the compute resources and storage resources are tied together in each blade, these are called blade servers.

The Modular Server distances storage from compute resources. You still have a motherboard and CPU(s) in each tray, but because there are no directly attached drives, these are now called compute nodes. The storage sits away from the compute nodes on the left side of the enclosure—a 14 x 2.5" drive pool that connects via a storage backplane at the back of the drive cage to the main backplane that runs across the whole middle of the enclosure. The SAS storage controller is one of several modules that plugs into the rear of this main backplane. Others include the remote management, Ethernet switch, and power supply modules

	SIMPLE TO SWAP The rear of the Modular Server is a study in redundancy. Builders can install up to two exhaust fans, two LAN switches, two storage controllers, one management module, and four power supplies, all of which pull easily from the chassis.

In effect, this separation of compute and storage resources gives you a “SAN in a box.” This means that up to six servers (the compute nodes) have equal access to the same storage pool. We use the word SAN here a bit liberally, because, for example, there’s no way today to daisy chain Modular Servers, equip them with Fibre Channel, or the like. The SAN is wholly contained within the box.

That said, having a SAN in a box is a tremendous asset. With conventional blades, if one server fails, the storage tied to that blade goes with it. With the Modular Server, if a compute node goes down, the admin can take the virtual drive volume, also called a LUN, tied to that node and reassign it to a spare or replacement node. When this process is automated through fail-over practices, downtime is virtually eliminated.

What’s New?
Since the Modular Server launch back in January, a few things have changed. We’re still waiting for the promised 6 x 3.5" drive cage to materialize, and Intel has yet to validate any 2.5" SATA drives—no surprise given that enterprise-class 2.5" SATA drives are still very rare. Nine months ago, we knew that the Modular Server could accommodate a spare storage controller module.

Now, in the fourth quarter, those spares are finally arriving.

Adding a second storage controller module to the Modular Server provides fail-over in case one controller goes offline, plus it can also be used for load balancing. If compute nodes 1 and 2 are generating a lot more storage traffic than 3 and 4, the system might assign 1 and 3 to the first controller with 2 and 4 assigned to the second—a much better situation than letting a single controller handle 1 and 2 and risk bottlenecking.

SAN IN A BOX Today’s Modular Server comes with a 14-unit cage for 2.5” SAS drives. These resources are separate from the six compute nodes and are simultaneously accessible by all of them, in effect making this a SAN.

Also recall that each storage modular carries an external SAS connector sporting 1.2 GB/s of peak bandwidth. A large RBOD stocked with high-speed drives configured in a striped array could easily swamp this connection. Adding the second Modular Server controller doubles this bandwidth, and most RBODs can accept at least two SAS connections.

Promise is one of the few companies with hardware validated to run with the Modular Server. Specifically, the Vtrak VTE310s is a 2U RBOD solution meant to expand the server’s storage capabilities. The box holds 12 3.5" SAS/SATA drive bays and contains dual everything: dual active-active SAS controllers, dual SAS ports, dual hot-swappable power supplies. There is no single point of failure, and Promise builds in hardware acceleration for every major RAID level from 0 to 60. Additionally, users can daisy chain up to four VTrak J-series JBOD enclosures off of the VTE310s.

That’s some massive storage potential, but there is one caveat. Because Promise uses its own internal RAID system and network-based management, the RBOD does not participate in the Modular Server’s internal SAN. The two exist as separate entities; you can’t add RBOD capacity onto the internal SAN’s capacity. However, given that the Modular Server’s internal storage tends to be used in an online fashion while RBOD/JBOD storage leans more into the nearline and archiving sides, this split storage implementation shouldn’t be much of an issue.

The good news with Promise’s RBOD is that now you have an indirect way of certifying SATA drives for the Modular Server. Because Intel approved the VTE310s and Promise has approved certain SATA drives for its RBOD, you have a back door to giving customers validated, less expensive mass storage for Intel’s solution.

While not as functionally exciting as dual storage controllers, you should also check out the new Silentium ActiveSilencer Enclosure for the Modular Server. If you’ve ever heard a Modular Server in the flesh, you know they’re not the quietest machines. Boot-up sends the fan modules into full-bore action, reaching up to 70 dB. Once the power management kicks in, the noise drops substantially, but it’s still quite noticeable in a room. This could be significant for users with, for instance, “personal HPC clusters,” where you might find the Modular Server by someone’s desk rather than in a back room. The ActiveSilencer can’t totally enclose the Modular Server because that would constrict airflow, which is vital to the unit for thermal control. Instead, the wheeled device uses the same technology as noise-canceling headphones. It analyzes the sound waves emitted by the Modular Server, then outputs an inverse wave set—an “anti-noise signal”—to shave up to 10 dB off of the perceived noise level.

A Virtual Breakthrough
SAP’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and five-application Business Suite (including titles for customer relationship management, product lifecycle management, supply chain management, and supplier relationship management) are main staples in large businesses. The massive software company has recently started an earnest push into the SMB space, but the key point here is that SAP solutions depend on fail-over technologies to ensure uptime. Implementing SAP in the SMB space has historically been costly and cumbersome because of the multiple machines required, but when Intel and SAP announced their new partnership at IDF, the Modular Server emerged as a key way to bring a full SAP solution to SMBs.

	HIGH AVAILABILITY In the server world, few things matter more than uptime. The Modular Server’s architecture is perfectly suited to platform’s like VMware’s HA, which helps protect against downtime from crashes and lock-ups.

“Basically, Modular Server can give you a SAP in a box,” says Intel’s Leavitt. “You have one server to run the application, one to run the database, and another one as a fail-over server. This is the only product in the market that has fail-over capability built-in. Unlike a blade setup, we have the operating system, applications, and data sitting on the SAN. With a blade, you have a hard drive on the blade containing the OS and everything. If that blade fails, you’re stuck. You can’t fail over an application. With Modular Server, that’s not the case. If I have a compute module that fails, you can simply take and move the virtual hard drives to another server and reboot it. It’s built-in fail-over capability for SAP.”

Those of you dealing with medium-sized businesses likely see the SAP light here, but small biz resellers might still give it a shrug. So here’s something you may find more interesting: virtualization. It’s today’s magic word, the topic that makes businesses of any size pay attention. Virtualization means consolidation, easier migration, higher ROI—all things that dovetail with Modular Server’s messaging.

You may have seen in our other coverage how Modular Server fits well as part of a Microsoft Essential Business Server solution. But the hardware’s SAN-based fail-over capabilities not only make it an ideal fit for Microsoft Cluster Server in HPC settings, but also VMware titles where fail-over support is essential. Such titles include High Availability (HA) and VMotion, the vendor’s popular server migration and load balancing software.

“You’ve gotta be able to share the drives with the servers,” explains Leavitt. “Today, when you buy VMware for a single server, you can do virtual machines on a server—a rack server or whatever. But if you want to do High Availability or VMotion, then you have to have a SAN because you have to fail over that virtual machine to another physical server.

“Now, the way HA works is if server 1 fails, then the virtual server and application will go down. HA will move it over [and] then automatically start it up on the other server. With VMotion, say you have 10 virtual machines running on two servers. They’ll sit there and move back and forth automatically throughout the day to get the best utilization of both servers. HA and VMotion—the whole VMware scene—is just super, super hot.”

TIME TO MIGRATE VMware’s VMotion package is another essential for businesses with several servers to manage. Whether IT needs to perform maintenance or upgrading on a server or simply implement more effective load balancing, VMotion can help…provided the platform rests on a SAN such as the Modular Server’s.

In picking one deployment example, Leavitt told us about a bank that bought a Modular Server specifically for its flexible storage and server fail-over benefits. This was a company with roughly 250 employees using 220 desktops. Given the company’s size and needs, the buyer estimated that the deployment cost of a Modular Server was about 10% of the cost of going out and buying a SAN with Fibre Channel. Moreover, the Modular Server was easier to set up and manage.

The ability to do LUN sharing hinges on having dual SAS controllers, and now this door is finally open. Channel resellers can tap into a broader virtualization market thanks to this new capability and the value benefits that it, as well as the complete Modular Server package, bring to the market. If you haven’t looked into Modular Server yet for your client base, this may be the moment to jump in.