The BL20p blades have two hot-swappable SCSI hard drives and an embedded hardware RAID controller with RAID Levels 0 and 1. Besides fast dual processors, the BL20p also offers three 10/100/1000 network cards. An additional network card is dedicated to HP's iLO (integrated Lights Out), which lets administrators remotely access the server console, power cycle the server and check the health of the system. The iLO boards included on the blade-server line do allow access to the OS' GUI-based console.
You can add Fibre Channel storage to the updated G2 blade server with the FC pass-through interconnect module. Other available modules include a patch panel that provides access to each of the network interfaces and a Gigabit Ethernet switch. Each chassis requires two interconnect modules for network access and FC connections for the blade servers.
One downside of the p-series blade servers is the lack of floppy or CD-ROM drives or USB ports. We needed to use a "virtual" drive, from a computer connected through the iLO management interface. This made installing software from CD more difficult, requiring a second computer or placing the installation files on the network first. Both HP's e series line and Dell's 1655MC have USB ports, where a floppy or CD-ROM drive could be connected.
Using iLO for remote control of a Windows 2000 server also took some practice because we had a hard time keeping the mouse in sync. That is, where the iLO interface thought the mouse should be and where it actually was on the remote session often did not jibe, making it hard to move the mouse near the edges of the remote-controlled server window. Refreshing the browser window usually fixed the problem, but not always, making iLO unusable at times. The RDP software also has a remote-control agent that worked better, but this approach requires the server to be in a working state; iLO does not because it works at the hardware level.
HP's RDP management software really shined, making it a breeze to deploy the OS. RDP let us do scripted installs of both Linux and Windows. Once a blade server was completely configured, RDP captured that image for a faster OS deployment. Because RDP is aware of the blade chassis, we could set it to detect when an unconfigured blade is placed into a slot and deploy a preset image down to the blade. So, in this case, if a blade server fails, just rip it out, put in a new one, and the management software will redeploy the image without administrator intervention. If we also wanted to have our applications redeployed, they had to be installed on the blade before the image was captured. Images are stored on the computer running the RDP management software.
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