Inspur Unveils I9000 Blade System in Converged Architecture at SC15

AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 17, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Inspur Group announced the launch of the Inspur I9000 Blade System at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC15). The world's leading modular product in converged architecture can converge multiple computing solutions in a single chassis, including high-density servers, 4-socket and 8-socket mission-critical servers, software-defined storage and heterogeneous computing, to meet the demands of various applications on hardware platforms, such as commercial HPC, enterprise-class business, cloud computing and big data.

Inspur, a leading server provider in China, is ranked number five in terms of server shipments in the world. The server maker is currently accelerating its business expansion worldwide and has already built a complete business system in the United States. I9000 is expected to be available in China and the United States at the same time. Mr. Hu Leijun, vice president, Inspur Group, was present at the launch event.

High-Specs Enable Diverse Computing Platforms

I9000 can scale to the maximum of 32 blade nodes and supports 2-socket, 4-socket and even 8-socket compute blades.

Inspur showcased two blade models, including NX5460M4 that can support 2 Intel^® Xeon^® processor E5-2600 v3 product family and up to 1.5TB memory, and NX8880M4 that can support 2 Intel Xeon^® processor E7-4800/8800 v3 family. NX8880M4 can be scaled up to four-socket and even eight-socket compute nodes.

I9000 also provides I/O or storage blades, combined with compute blades, to form a diverse range of computing platforms.

The system is modular-designed with all modules supporting hot-swap for easy maintenance. The management module enables full system management in a unified interface to simplify data center management.

Meet Various Application Demands

• Ideal platform for commercial HPC

32 nodes in a 12U chassis provide higher computing power in the same floor space. 4-socket and 8-socket nodes can be used for commercial HPC applications with higher requirements for single-node computing performance, reliability and scalability, such as CAE (Computer-Aided Engineering), CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics), gene therapy, financial service and data mining.

The I9000, which supports the Intel® Xeon Phi™coprocessor,  is ideal for a broad range of highly-parallel applications, such as machine learning, oil & gas exploration and gene analysis. Inspur will also introduce the next generation of platforms using future Intel® Xeon Phi™ processors (codenamed "Knights Landing").

• Reliable enterprise-class business platform

I9000 can support 2-socket, 4-socket and 8-socket blades, centralized or distributed storage, and all mainstream network technologies, such as 10Gb Ethernet, 40Gb Ethernet and 16Gb FC SAN. In this way, it can deal with both mainstream and mission-critical workloads, reducing the complexity of the whole infrastructure.

• Better implementation of software-defined data center

With innovations of hardware design, resources in I/O-expansion blades and storage-expansion blades can be flexibly allocated to compute blades in a software-defined way, realizing storage and I/O resource centralization and pooling.

Design for Future System Architecture

I9000 is not only designed for current technology, but also for future trend. 100Gb interface bandwidth of compute blades in this system will effectively support the Intel Omni-Path Architecture, which delivers superior performance in HPC network. Inspur took great care in developing the I9000 to be optimized for the next-generation Intel^® Xeon Phi™ processor, codenamed "Knights Landing", in order to deliver a sustainable solution for highly-parallel applications.

"Inspur is always committed to driving advanced computing platform design and application. We have mature converged architecture products and solutions for HPC and enterprise-class applications." said Mr. Hu Leijun, vice president of Inspur Group. "I9000 is an ideal infrastructure platform for these customers."

"Intel is excited to collaborate with Inspur in bringing the Intel^® Xeon Phi™ product family and Intel^® Omni-Path Architecture technologies to market," said Hugo Saleh, director of HPC Marketing and Industry Development at Intel. "We look forward to working with Inspur to bring platforms based on the Intel^® Scalable System Framework to market, enabling balanced, easy-to-use, and flexible HPC solutions for customers worldwide."

About Inspur

Inspur Group, the world's leading cloud computing product and solution provider, is committed to offering data centers with advanced IT infrastructure products and solutions. It is active in X86 server, minicomputer, high-performance computing, high-end storage, cloud computing and big data fields. Inspur is ranked fifth in the world in terms of server shipments, and number one in China. Its products are already widely used at leading Internet firms such as Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, and in the telecommunications, energy, transport, utility and education fields.

SOURCE Inspur Group Co., Ltd.