HPE Superdome X FAQs

The HPE Superdome X was originally released in December 2014 and is intended to run resource-intensive mission critical workloads like SQL Server 2016.  The HPE Superdome offers several unique features and in this article, I’ll cover some FAQs about the HPE Superdome X.

What is the HPE Superdome X?
The Superdome X is an enterprise level x86 server that’s designed to support mission critical workloads that require maximum scalability and reliability. It is intended to run the most resource intensive business processing, decision support, virtualization and database workloads, including SQL Server, SAP and Oracle.

Isn’t the Superdome X an Itanium server?
No. HPE markets a separate server called the Integrity Superdome 2 that is built around the Itanium chip and it runs HP-UX. The HPE Superdome X is an x86 server that uses the Intel Xeon Processor E7 v3 processor family and it runs SLES, RHEL, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2, VMware vSphere and CentOS. It will also be certified for Windows Server 2016 when Microsoft releases it.

What is the maximum scalability of the Superdome X?
The HPE Superdome X provides extreme scalability. In its maximum configuration it can support up to 16 sockets and 288 cores. You can configure the Superdome X with one to eight scalable BL920 Gen9 x86 blades. The maximum memory capacity is 3 TB per blade for a total of 24 TB of RAM for a fully configured Superdome X server.  SQL Server 2016 can scale to consume all of these cores and with Windows Server 2016, scalability will be up to 640 cores.

What availability features does the Superdome X have?
The HPE Superdome X is designed to provide five nines (99.999 percent) of availability. All key Superdome X hardware components are redundant and hot-swappable. This includes components like power supplies, fans, and I/O switches. The Superdome X uses a “firmware first” architecture that is able to contain errors in the firmware before any corrupted data can reach the OS. In addition, the built-in Error Analysis Engine (EAE) constantly analyzes all possible hardware faults, predicts errors and can automatically initiate recovery actions without any operator actions.

What are nPars?
The Superdome X supports multiple hardware partitions that are called nPars. Each nPar partition can be completely electrically isolated from the other partitions. Using the HPE Superdome X nPar technology, you can effectively run multiple diverse workloads on the same server system and those workloads will not interfere with one another. For instance, you can run an instance of the SQL Server relational database in one partition and SQL Server Analysis Services and Reporting Services in another partition. Even though these workloads have very different characteristics, they would be completely isolated from one another just as if they were running on separate systems.

Which virtualization technologies are supported with Superdome X?

Superdome X is certified for Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and KVM/RHEV virtualization.

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