HPE Synergy 12000 Frame - REVIEW

This is the transcript of my video Review of the HPE Synergy 12000 Frame that's been posted to YouTube, below.

The HPE Synergy 12000 Frame supports up to 12 half height server nodes in what HPE calls a composable infrastructure. This is different than traditional network architecture, which features separate building-block appliances for compute, storage, and I/O. The Frame 12000 includes all of these components in a single chassis. HPE’s One View management software is what brings it all together by creating pools of hardware components as virtual assets. IT administrators can then “compose” these virtual assets for different workflows, or recompose to address other workloads, all in the same chassis or across multiple chassis—very quickly.

The underlying goal of this “Composable Architecture” is to deliver assets that energize growth, strengthen profitability, boost productivity, enhance innovation, increase organizational agility, improve the customer experience, And, provide a competitive advantage. I grabbed that right off of the HPE website… In a nutshell, composable infrastructures use a version of HPE’s OneView software to create software-defined pools from the associated hardware resources of compute, memory, storage, and I/O across the network. The management software allows IT Administrators to compose environments using those pools of resources to optimize specific applications, without over or under-allocating resources and workloads—quickly. That’s where the agility part comes in. Composable infrastructures, by their nature, allow for rapid deployment and modification of infrastructure assets. With an agile infrastructure, companies can get to market faster, and adjust quickly to changing market trends. Another aspect is to drive down costs, negating the need for separate teams responsible for, storage, networking, and administration.

The HPE Synergy 12000 Frame is such an appliance. The 10U chassis can support a multitude of different Synergy blades including up to 6 Full-Width, 12 half-width, 6 x double-wide half-width modules, three double-wide full-height compute modules, or a combination of these options. It’s also compatible across Gen9 and Gen10 Synergy blades. With 12 half-width Synergy 480 Gen10 blades outfitted with dual Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors, that’s 24 CPUs and up to 672 cores in a 10U space! This system is highly redundant with backups for backups, ensuring continuous operation under rigorous usage. HPE’s OneView is embedded on one or two management modules, and there’s also 10 fans, 6x 2.6KiloWatt power modules, and up to six I/O fabric modules for 3 3 redundancy per Frame.

Our chassis features 12 HPE Synergy 480 Compute Modules, used for general purpose applications. Each has dual Intel Xeon E5-2660 v4 processors. Sixteen of the slots on each compute module are populated with 8GB memory modules for a total of 128GB with both processors installed. Three mezzanine connectors support cards that link to one of three Interconnect modules located on the back of the system. Each compute node also has two 2.5-inch drives for local storage and a micro SD card slot located just beneath the HD trays.

As I said, the Synergy 12000 Frame supports several other compute and storage modules, including the HPE Synergy D3940 12Gb SAS Drive enclosure, which by the way is ideal for direct attached storage. It provides up to 40 Small Form Factor SAS drives and the enclosure can support up to 10 compute modules at 12Gb per second using SAS HDDs or SSDs.

The Synergy Console on the front of the system is the Frame resource information control panel. This is where you connect to the chassis for setup and installation, plus access to One View for Frame infrastructure management. Access to the Synergy Console from the back of system is through one of the Frame Link Modules, which is the control and information link for the rest of the hardware. The Frame Link Module delivers data through a private Ethernet networking solution at 10 Gb/s.

You can install one or two of HPE’s Synergy Composer modules to manage the system. One is required and two are highly recommended for redundancy. HPE’s OneView software is embedded on the Synergy Composer management module, which mounts in one of the two Appliance bays on the front left side of the system. The Synergy composer leverages the information provided by OneView to provide a single point of management enabling you to identify and allocate all Synergy resources including Compute, Memory, Storage, and Fabrics within a single frame or across several connected Frames and enclosures. It also features auto discovery when new hardware is added to the network. Profiles and templates for common applications are also included with the program, making it even easier to compose environments to support diverse workloads.

LEDs on the front of the Composer provide system status indicating activity, health, and power. And that single USB port is for an HPE certified Service provider only. A single Synergy Composer can manage one or more Frames linked through the Frame Link Module. Dual Synergy Composers are recommended for redundancy and high availability.

Although, instead of a second HPE Synergy Composer you could also go with an HPE Synergy Image Streamer. The Image Streamer works with the Composer to provide enterprise-level management and give this platform greater agility to deploy and update infrastructure. The Synergy Streamer also helps you manage the system like a virtual machine instead of a physical appliance. It uses the software-defined data from the Composer to help you rapidly deploy an Operating System, identify and itemize the boot and run storage volumes, and update compute modules with operating environments, at extreme speed In a traditional environment installing an OS or Hypervisor might take a while and include several restarts. With Synergy, the Composer and Streamer do the dirty work for fast implementation of OS images on compute nodes, and bare metal deployments directly into a running OS. Surprisingly none of these operations requires the use of any assets in the compute modules, which by the way is the definition of Stateless operation.

Opening the lines of communication within, and between frames are the HPE Synergy Frame Link (FLM) modules with two module slots located on the back left-hand side of the chassis. The Frame Link Modules provide a direct link to the Synergy Composer for resource information, it also connects directly to the Interconnect Modules. Each Synergy 12000 Frame comes with at least one Frame Link Module, which provides an optional air-gapped 10GbE management network ring for multi-Frame communications. If you want redundancy or if you want to link multiple Frames, you will need that second Frame Link module for each additional Frame chassis you connect.

The Interconnect Modules provide network communications. Module options support a number of different workloads and include Virtual Connect, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and Satellite Interconnection Modules. Each of the potential three Interconnect modules on the top half of the system has its doppelganger twin for redundancy in the lower portion of the chassis. The interconnect modules connect directly to the Mezzanine cards supported on the compute nodes loaded in the front bays. Server nodes Like this Synergy 480 Gen9 server node, have the potential to support up to 3 separate mezzanine cards, each of which can be routed to a separate Interconnect module in the upper portion of the chassis, supported by its redundant twin in the lower portion of the chassis. As an example, a mezzanine card in slot 1 on the compute node will connect to the Interconnect Module slot one with redundancy supported in the Interconnect Module in slot 4.

On this specific chassis we have four Interconnect modules total, and that would be with two modules for redundancy. There are two HPE Virtual Connect SE 40Gb F8 Modules supporting super-fast network communications at 40Gb per second. The other two Interconnect modules are HPE Brocade 16Gb Fibre Channel Switch modules, for connecting to other networks or storage adapters. Other Optional Interconnect Modules provide connection speeds ranging from 10Gb up to 40Gb/s, and there are several to choose from, depending on your intended workload.

The HPE Synergy 12000 Frame is very much like a blade server allowing for support of several different operating systems and applications in the same chassis, plus back-end support for stability and security, and shared resources. Combine that with the ability to rapidly deploy new applications and environments with a software management system that recognizes all hardware components as virtual assets and can pool these resources across multiple Frames and enclosures in a linear fashion, and let the music begin. We hoped you enjoyed our review of the HPE Synergy 12000 Frame. If you have any questions on this platform, or any other, just post them in the comments section below, thanks for watching!