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Henan Mobile conserves energy with Opteron-based servers

(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2009-08-07 10:32

Henan Mobile, a provincial branch of China Mobile - the world's largest mobile service operator by users, has managed to conserve energy by adopting HP blade servers based on Quad-core AMD Opteron? processors, thus gaining a favorable position in competition.

Before turning to the HP blade servers last year, Henan Mobile ran its supporting systems with UNIX server which has various problems such as high costs of purchase, operation and maintenance, and complicated maintenance, according to persons within the company.

That put Henan Mobile at a disadvantage in the ever increasing competition with the other two major mobile service providers China Telecom and China Unicom.

To cope with the situation, Henan Mobile decided to shift to the HP blade server cluster, which includes both application and access servers based on the Quad-core AMD Opteron? processors.

The HP Blade System BL685c G5 blade server cluster runs as application server, equipped with four Quad-core AMD Opteron? 8300 processors, providing powerful 64-bit quad-core computing capacity and leading performance-per-watt of the industry.

AMD innovative technologies including HyperTransport, integrated memory controller and Direct Connect Architecture, can optimize performance and bandwidth of each core or processor, eliminate the intrinsic bottleneck of the conventional front side bus architecture, thus improving overall system performance and multi-processor efficiency.

When deployed in the multi-processor HP Blade System BL685c G5, the Direct Connect Architecture and HyperTransport innovations can minimize the transport bottlenecks between various processors, taking full advantages of multi-processors.

The HP access server cluster adopts HP Blade System BL465c G5 two-processor blade server, providing access services to operation terminals such as operation hall, broker outlet and chain store, as well as access to operation-related business such as e-channel.

By applying the AMD processor with innovative Direct Connect Architecture, the HP server has features identical with 1U rack server while having two Quad-core AMD Opteron? processors, plus advanced energy-conserving characteristics and powerful high-density computing performance.

"By introducing the HP blade server cluster based on the AMD Opteron? processor, we have substantially reduced the purchase, operation and maintenance costs, while obtaining excellent performance per watt and extensibility," said a technician from the business support center under the Henan Mobile.

The new HP blade servers with high performance processors improved the performance of CRM system by 30 to 50 percent, he added, while reducing 40 percent of the quantity of 42U standard racks.

The energy-efficient Quad-core AMD Opteron? processor also brought about a fall of 57 percent in electricity consumption, according to him.