The HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9 is an impressively powerful, half-height blade server that is designed to be installed in HPE’s BladeSystem c3000 or c7000 enclosure. Boasting two-socket performance, this flexible and easily-sized workload solution is perfect for optimizing core IT applications.
It can support up to two Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 or E5-2600 v4 processors with a maximum of 4 to 22 cores, depending on the type and number of processors used. The v4 processor version provides a 21% boost in performance compared to its v3 counterpart, and all processors come with Intel Hyper-Threading and Intel Turbo Boost Technologies. Certain Xeon v3 and v4 processors may restrict access to DIMM slots 4 and 5, and only support 12 out of the 16 total DIMM slots.
There are 16 memory slots total, 8 per processor, with support for HPE SmartMemory DDR4 load-reduced (LRDIMM) and registered (RDIMM) memory modules. LRDIMMs can provide up to 2TB of total memory and transfer speeds of up to 2400MT/s when 16 128GB memory modules are used, while RDIMMs provide a maximum of 512GB of memory with the use of 32GB memory modules. For maximum speed, a compatible processor must be installed. The speed of the memory is also affected by the quantity and type of DIMMs installed.
Storage capacity for the BL460c is just as impressive. Up to two SFF SAS, SATA HDDs or SSDs, or two hot plug NVMe SSD drive bays are supported, with 7.68TB of storage capacity for the first option and 4.0TB for the latter. An M.2 enablement kit provides extra fast storage, or it can be used as a boot device. Available storage controllers include the HPE SmartArray P244br, the Smart HBA H244br, the HP B140i SATA, and optional dual port Fibre Channel mezzanine cards.
Two PCIe 3.0 slots are available on the system and with the addition of optional mezzanine risers, they can support dual port 10Gb and 20Gb FlexFabric, dual port Fibre channel HBA, QDR and FDR InfiniBand, and I/O accelerator options. A single processor provides access to one expansion slot, while the second expansion slot requires two processors. A midplane located at the chassis level provides an aggregate bandwidth of 7 TB/s and connects the server blades to network and shared storage via the NonStop midplane. This feeds in to the interconnect modules located at the back of the blade enclosure, where the actual network ports can be found.