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Netweb SBE 710E-R42 Blade Server Enclosure

The Netweb SBE 710E-R42 is a blade server enclosure from Netweb technologies which supports 10 full height blades in a 7U frame.

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PCQ Bureau
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The Netweb SBE 710E-R42 is a blade enclosure from Netweb

technologies which supports 10 full height blades in a 7U frame. The blades

which the enclosure can support can be a mix and match from Intel or AMD-based

CPUs. The blade enclosure is powered by four 1400 Watt power supplies which have

been integrated with the 8 cooling fans in such a way that a cooling unit with 2

cooling fan modules sports a power socket.

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This enclosure from Netweb has more than ten different

options of blade configurations to choose from. RAMfor

instance can vary from 48 GB (6 DIMM slots) to 192 GB (24 DIMM slots). There are

many options to choose from in terms of RAM as the range varies from a low of 48

GB ( 6 DIMM slots ) to as high as 192 GB (24 DIMM slots).

We received 3 blades from Netweb along with the enclosure,

all based on Intel processors.

One of the blades was powered by 2 Intel Xeon E5410 2.33

GHz processors with an option of populating six 2.5” HDD bays. It also had two

36 GB SAS drives, 6 DIMM slots  out of which 2 were populated with 2 GB RAM.

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The other Intel Xeon powered blade had an option of

plugging in two 3.5” HDDs, but came with one 250 GB HDD. It had an option to to

populate 8 DIMM slots but came with only 4 GB.

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The third blade, containing the Intel Xeon processor, had

similar specs as the first. Six 2.5” drive bays populated with four 36 GB SAS

drives came along with 4 GB RAM. This blade, like the first had 8 DIMM slots

which can be populated as when required.

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Two LEDs are located at the top right of the enclosure

above the right most blade. The left LED provides Power Status information and

the right LED glows only if there's a fault in the enclosure. The blade servers

have 4 LED  indicators on the front which indicate basic info. These LEDs are

for  power, KVM control, network control, and one which glows whenever there is

a problem with the blade. These LEDs act as the first point of indicators for

basic information about blade functioning.

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The rear of the chassis has four pairs of cooling fans

integrated with PSUs, one redundant KVM, and a GbE switch.

The Netweb chassis alone weighs about 37Kg and after

populating it with the blades it will weigh about 105 Kg. It is important to

note that a fully populated blade chassis combines the weight of the chassis,

blades, power units, cooling fans, switches, KVMs, etc. The average weight of

the blade we received was 6.75 Kg. These specifications need to be kept in mind

when the racks and channels are being designed, to prevent any mishaps.

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Ease of setup

Setting up the Netweb chassis and the blades is fairly easy. We simply need

to power on the chassis and start plugging in the blades. Now, a physical boot

of the blade is required. Press the KVM boot on the front of the blade. This

triggers the blade to be displayed on the remote login of the server. From here,

we can provide a .iso image of the operating system to be installed onto the

blade. After the operating system has been installed, an upgrade of the firmware

and BIOS is all that is required for the blade to be up and running.

Mid-plane info

As the name suggests, the mid-plane sits in the middle of the blade

enclosure and allows the blade servers to be connected from the front, and the

power supplies, network switches, and cooling fans to be plugged in from the

rear.

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The blade container has an easy sliding lid design to

cover the components. It does not take much time to remove or place it back.
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The mid-plane also connects the Gigabit(GbE) switches to

Network Interface Controller, the Chassis Management Module(CMM) to the USB

devices and the InfiniBand Switch to the Host Channel Adapters. These devices

connect to the mid-plane through high density connectors that provide both

signal and power. Such a configuration reduces the amount of system cabling and

simplifies the task of setting up the system. It provides an alternative signal

route to support redundant power, CMM, network and IPMI functions.

Hot Swappability and redundancy

Hot swapping functionality is available for cooling fans, PSUs (onboard fan

modules), hard drives of blades and the blade servers themselves. The Ethernet

Switches are redundant as they have been coupled with another unit of the same

value. The enclosure is cooled by four twin cooling fan units which have been

integrated with a power supply socket. These power supplies are 4 (3+1

redundant) in nature, thus bringing the total number of cooling fans to 8 ( 6+2

redundant). There is redundancy in terms of the network switch and the CMM

(chassis management module) which has been discussed in the network fabric

subhead.

The network fabric

The blade enclosure sports a 1Gb Ethernet switch module or 1Gb Pass-through

Module (optional) or 1/10 Gb Ethernet switch. This is a redundant unit for a

similar unit can be installed to provide fail safe networking capability to the

enclosure. The Netweb chassis sports a CMM which can be made redundant by adding

another unit just beside it. This is the module which is used to connect the

chassis to the network for effective management. The bottom right of the chassis

provides the option of either plugging in an InfiniBand Switch or a 10 Gb

Pass-through Module (optional).

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Each blade sports a KVM connector. These can be used to

plug in a monitor, USB keyboard and mouse providing an option of physical

control over individual blades. The Netweb chassis does not contain any LCD

panel or any immediate info panel, like other blade enclosures. The blades can

be provided a unique IP address. This facilitates remote network access.

Blade management software

The Netweb management interface is a software based console which provides

all information on the blade chassis, the inserted blades, PSUs, cooling fans,

network cards, etc. The information regarding the interior temperature, fan

speed, network IP etc are all available under their respective tabs. This

facilitates identification of problems and troubleshooting from the console. The

console is fairly easy to operate and does not require high levels of expertise.

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You can easily find information about the power

consumed by different blades through this remote console.
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Power consumption

After powering on the Blade enclosure and all rear components (CMM, fans,

PSUs, I/O modules, etc) plugged in, the SBE 710E-R42 consumed around 105 Watts

of power. This power consumption is lesser than Dell PowerEdge M1000e. Please

note this power consumption is of the chassis sans any of the blades. After

plugging in the blades, we measured the power consumption of each blade remotely

using the CMM. It showed the power consumed by the three blades as 400 watts,

150 watts and 225 watts respectively.

Netweb SBE 710E-R42 Blade Server Enclosure

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Temperature control

When any of the redundant cooling fans malfunctions, the temp inside the

blade chassis goes up due to the instability in cooling. The change in

temperature can be observed from the chassis Management Module (CMM). We created

a fan failure scenario by pulling the fan out of the chassis. In case of the

Netweb blade chassis, the internal power meter measures this change in

temperature. This is followed by an automatic instruction to the fans to

increase their RPM by bringing the internal temperature back to normal. The

point to be noted here is that with an increase in RPM of fans, their power

consumption goes up and that increases the noise they produce.

Bottomline: The Netweb enclosure has lesser features

than Dell PowerEdge. For instance, it does not have a fiber optic channel nor

does it have an LCD panel. Also, the fans and PSUs can only be replaced in

pairs. But it is a good buy nevertheless for smaller data centers.

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