Bull has launched its Novascale Bullion, a scalable high-end server, designed to respond to business needs for more reliable infrastructures, high-availability, greater agility and energy management.
Novascale Bullion represents an advance towards a private enterprise cloud computing infrastructure. It optimises resource management and facilitates project development. With its native virtualisation capabilities based on VMware technology, the server makes it possible to run multiple critical applications simultaneously, on a single machine.
Novascale Bullion offers all the advantages of continuous availability with built-in redundancy of critical components, hot-swapping, the ability to update or add components without having to power down the machine, automatic correction and predictable maintenance.
The modular architecture means customers only pay for what is really used or consumed, according to the 'pay as you grow' model. The server also uses standard components to deliver a better performance/cost ratio and much greater openness. It provides a high number of virtual machines per socket and per physical machine, which reduces the cost of software licenses and support. With fewer objects to manage, simplified high-availability architectures, a built-in disaster recovery plan and easier updates for hardware, software and firmware alike, systems administration costs for the server are considerably lower than two-socket server architectures.
Novascale Bullion integrates into existing environments with great ease, and with no interoperability problems. It is available with powerful solutions like Bull System Manager and VMware vCentre Server to maximise flexibility for greater responsiveness.
The server's architecture uses Bull Coherence Switch (BCS) technology, which has been specifically conceived to meet organisations' demands for scalability. Native virtualisation and resource sharing enable organisations to combine high performance with intelligent energy consumption. For example, the server's power supply reduces on average the energy consumption by 40 per cent according to the tests performed by Bull Competence Centres.
Novascale Bullion has been developed with dense and modular packaging. Each module includes four Intel Xeon 7500 series processors, 512GB RAM, six PCIe slots and a patented active/passive power supply that significantly improves energy efficiency. VMware vSphere virtualisation hypervisor, which is natively integrated into the server, helps ensure optimum resource utilisation.
The use of Bull Coherence Switch (BCS) technology means the following options are possible: four modules are stackable, to form a single system with up to 16 sockets and 128 cores; up to 2TB RAM to support virtualised and memory-hungry applications; 24 PCI slots to connect to 10Gb/s Ethernet and/or 8Gb/s Fibre Channel networks; 16 embedded Ethernet 1Gb/s connections, to provide network security and dedicated bandwidth; and 32 hot-swappable SAS or SDD disks, with 9.6TB of disk space in RAID mode. A 16-socket 12U server can be accommodated in a 19-inch rack.
