Bull Bullion
Rely on the Industry's Most Powerful Scalable Platform

Overview:

Bullion is the world's fastest x86 enterprise server, designed specifically for the virtualization of business-critical applications. The technical alliance between Bull and VMware offers a unique quality of service and an optimal flexibility.

Meeting the challenges of virtualization

Bullion is designed specifically for data center consolidation – even of business critical applications – enabling organizations to make a major step-change in the evolution of their information systems. As the most powerful x86 enterprise server in the world, bullion makes it easy to manage resources and seamlessly adapt systems to changing business needs. Resulting from Bull's knowhow in designing mainframe servers, it combines the best available components with an architecture designed to deliver the very best service levels available. Moreover, the technology collaboration between VMware, the world leading business virtualization infrastructure provider, and Bull, guarantees the most trusted and reliable platform for building private clouds and federating to public clouds. Thanks to its native virtualization capabilities, bullion offers the flexibility you need to deploy applications of all types quickly and securely.

Reducing the cost of the datacenter

At a time when demanding and business critical applications are a source of high infrastructure cost and low agility, bullion reconciles operational excellence with cost of use, increasing significantly the flexibility, availability and quality of service. Besides being the most powerful server in its class, bullion offers a competitive TCO, simplifying the datacenter administration and reducing the cost ot the software part. And with its ultra-capacity, its modularity and its low energy consumption design, the benefits of bullion go beyond infrastructure rationalization.

Bullion X86 enterprise server: the world’s fastest

The bullion server developed by Bull has been ranked as the world’s fastest X86 enterprise-class server, according to the international SPECint_rate2006[1] benchmark. The benchmark – which was run on a ‘fat’, 16-socket configuration – highlights bullion’s exceptional characteristics, which make it almost twice as powerful as all its rivals. Featuring 160 Intel Xeon E7 cores and 4 Terabytes of RAM, the bullion server achieved peak performance of 4,110 according to the SPECint2006 benchmark. The fastest competitive system only managed a performance of 2,180.

Unrivalled features

• Bullion is a unique platform, designed specifically for the virtualization of business-critical applications:
• At least, twice as powerful as any other x86 server
• Total linear performance, from four to 16 CPUs, offering guaranteed application workload scalability even in the most demanding environments
• 100% memory reliability, backed by Bull's experience in mainframe development and Unix environments
• Quick, secure deployment of business critical applications and service continuity backed by the flexibility of VMware tools
• Ultra-compact design and high levels of with an "Active/Passive" PSU developed by Bull, making bullion the essential choice for organizations looking to drive down their electricity consumption
• Optimized TCO, with VM concentration and bullion's outstanding energy performance and "Pay as you grow" approach, with bullion's scalability.

Specifically designed for the virtualization of critical applications

Bullion is the reliable solution that IT departments have been waiting for to consolidate their business critical applications. Fruit of the largest reservoir of expertise in Europe for the design, development and implementation of business critical systems, bullion possesses all the attributes required by these types of systems: hardware failure isolation with no impact on production, firmware upgrades on the fly, and a maintenance processor for remote control. Its modular architecture of up to four building blocks of 3U each, together with native virtualization, provides optimum flexibility. Moreover, its magnitude of system resources is unequaled for scalable infrastructure deployment, especially for Windows business applications. True expandability and scalability become reality.

Unsurpassed Quality of Service even while improving the TCO

For a typical infrastructure, the deployment of bullion systems divide, on average, the number of managed objects by a factor of 10. Added to this is another key function: the dynamic allocation of resources. This approach provides a major financial benefit by optimizing the number of software licenses. At the operations level, Quality of Service is also improved through integrated management and simplified high availability architecture. In addition, the stability and coherence of the modular bullion architecture, from 4 to 16 sockets, allows a "pay as you grow" type of approach, with a view towards drastic reduction of acquisition and ownership costs.

A new equation for optimum energy efficiency

Bullion improves energy efficiency up to 40%, thanks to its native virtualization hypervisor providing: consolidation without the "threshold effect" of n to n VM systems; the reduction in power consumption of n systems through moving them to bullion; and the rapid start-up and inactivation of the VM. This system has many green components developed by Bull engineers, such as the Bull patented active/passive power solution. Wherever possible, low power consumption components have been chosen, the power supplies with 99% efficiency being but one example. Finally, Bull System Manager, the Bull developed management and monitoring system, reduces the power consumption as a function of load (CPU, fans, memory) and inactivates idle resources. With this set of features, bullion has the best performance per watt versus comparable competitive systems.

A complete catalog of dedicated services

Bull has put in place a full catalog of services for bullion, to ensure the maximum Quality of Service for this type of high-end server. These services cover implementation, deployment, maintenance and support, as well as consulting services for virtualization, high availability, performance management and architecture optimization. All these services benefit from Bull's expertise in mission critical servers.

Functionalities:

In a market driven by a central promise: to regain control over the proliferation of servers; bullion, a Bull designed system, goes a step further in virtualizing business critical applications. Based on a modular architecture, and natively embedding the VMware ESXi virtualization hypervisor, bullion is the answer to enabling IT departments to consolidate Xeon-based business applications while providing reliability and simplicity.

1. Specifically designed for the virtualization of critical applications
   Fruit of the largest reservoir of expertise in Europe for the design, development and implementation of business critical systems, bullion possesses all the attributes required by these types of systems: hardware failure isolation with no impact on production, firmware upgrades on the fly, and a maintenance processor for remote control. Its modular architecture of up to four building blocks of 3U each, together with native virtualization, provides optimum flexibility. Moreover, its magnitude of system resources is unequaled for scalable infrastructure deployment, especially for Windows business applications. True expandability and scalability become reality.
   
   
2. Unsurpassed Quality of Service even while improving the TCO 
   For a typical infrastructure, the deployment of bullion systems divide, on average, the number of managed objects by a factor of 10. Added to this is another key function: the dynamic allocation of resources. This approach provides a major financial benefit by optimizing the number of software licenses. At the operations level, Quality of Service is also improved through integrated management and simplified high availability architecture. In addition, the stability and coherence of the modular bullion architecture, from 4 to 16 sockets, allows a "Pay as you grow" type of approach, with a view towards drastic reduction of acquisition and ownership costs. 
   
   
3. A new equation for optimum energy efficiency
   bullion provides improvements of up to 40% in energy efficiency, thanks to its native virtualization hypervisor providing: consolidation without the “threshold effect” of n to n VM systems; the reduction in power consumption of n systems through moving them to bullion; and the rapid start-up and inactivation of the VM. This system has many green components developed by Bull engineers, such as the Bull patented active/passive power solution. Wherever possible, low power consumption components have been chosen, the power supplies with 91% efficiency being but one example. Finally, Bull System Manager, the Bull developed management and monitoring system, reduces the power consumption as a function of load (CPU, fans, memory) and inactivates idle resources. With this set of features, bullion has the best performance per watt versus comparable competitive systems. 
   
   
4. A complete catalog of dedicated services 
   Bull has put in place a full catalog of services for bullion, to ensure the maximum Quality of Service for this type of high-end server. These services cover implementation, deployment, maintenance and support, as well as consulting services for virtualization, high availability, performance management and architecture optimization. All these services benefit from Bull’s expertise in mission critical servers.

Why Choose Bullion:

Bullion, designed specifically for the virtualization of business-critical applications

• Twice as powerful as any other x86 server
• Totally linear performance increases, from four to 16 CPUs
• 25 % less floor space
• Up to 70% lower software infrastructure costs
• At least 30% lower electricity consumption
• 100 % memory reliability

Where do you start to...

Optimize your infrastructures and cut your administration costs
Bull carries out audits of x86 environments and completes Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) assessments to measure the real benefits of consolidation.

Ensure a better quality of service
Bull conducts resource utilization audits to identify weak points and the best corrective actions to take.

Secure the virtualization of your critical applications
Bull implements Proof of Concepts (POC) at one of its Competency Centers to compare bullion against your needs and to evaluate potential benefits.

Optimize your resources
Bull performs energy audits to assess the possible return on investment (ROI) from optimization measures.

Solutions:

Critical applications: the key to your business success

Bringing together an organization's core expertise, its most sensitive data, and critical applications are vital to its growth and productivity. These systems are the key to staying ahead of your competition and require ever-present security, unfailing reliability, and heightened availability. Everything has to be accessible as fast as possible, at all times...even during maintenance operations.

The problem is that the traditional solution of having a server for each application – long seen as the simplest, most cost-effective and robust approach – is now coming up against a hard reality: the proliferation of hundreds, even thousands of servers that are hard to manage, calling reliability into question. Businesses face a crucial question: how do they effectively achieve robustness and agility, when every application has its own specific and unique processing requirements?

A growing need for simplicity and responsiveness

The faster the world changes, the greater the need for businesses to respond and act quickly. To survive in today's markets, organizations must be able to equip themselves quickly and easily with the infrastructures they need to evolve (to launch a new product, merge with another business, etc.). Users must be able to access their applications easily, without wasting time, and with guaranteed total reliability.

Already, using standard virtualization technologies, organizations have been able to rationalize some of their infrastructures: their development environments and application infrastructures, but if they are going to extend this approach to their critical applications, businesses are now demanding that everything is in place to guarantee service quality and control at the highest level.

A major advance towards a services-oriented approach. A first step towards internal Cloud computing.

An irrational waste of your resources

• How to prevent your maintenance and operating costs from spiraling?
• How to control the growing cost of buying new systems?
• How to limit the space needed for all those servers?
• How to restrict the amount of electricity they use; especially since this now represents a significant part of most organizations' energy bills?

These are burning questions at a time when everyone is expected to be environmentally responsible. Managing each system independently has put the shackles on IT Departments.

Only a holistic, open approach, based on industry standards, can liberate them again. In the space of just a few years, virtualization technologies have emerged as the best response to this situation. bullion enables organizations to make a major step-change in the evolution of their information systems: by consolidating their critical applications

A new kind of service quality, never before available in the standard world

In designing this new system, Bull's aim was to bring simplicity back into the heart of information systems.

With unrivalled features in the world of standard servers, bullion makes it easy to manage resources and to seamlessly adapt your systems to your changing business needs. As a mainframe-class system, bullion combines the best available components with an architecture designed to deliver guaranteed reliability and availability.

Thanks to its native virtualization capabilities, bullion brings a whole new flexibility to your critical applications, with a corresponding improvement in your business performance. No more duplication, no more waste, a concentration of resources that is resolutely modular and knows how to adapt to meet changing demand: these are the key advantages of a 'scale-up' architecture, which stays true to the principles of a standards-based approach.

Bullion, specifically designed for virtualization of business critical applications

A true instrument for business, bullion has been conceived and developed by Bull with a desire to meet organizations' most fundamental needs for a stable infrastructure, high availability and flexibility. bullion is innovative and different: it's very DNA is built around an environmentally responsible approach. Europe's largest team of experts specializing in the design and implementation of critical systems has been fully involved in its creation.

Bullion, four precious ingots of concentrated technology:

• Its modular architecture brings you the most powerful, scalable platform available; to supercharge your capacity for growth
• bullion offers all the advantages of permanent availability, with built-in redundancy of critical elements, hot-swappable components, which can be updated or added without switching off the machine, automatic correction and predictive maintenance
• Because it natively integrates VMware virtualization solutions, bullion is optimized to offer you all the benefits of the most mature product on the market, as well as a consistent infrastructure platform
• And finally, bullion opens up the way to designing Bio Data Centers, featuring the simplest, most robust and energy-saving infrastructures.

A powerful combination of operational excellence and low running costs: bullion's greatest strength

With bullion, there is no real price to pay for the operational excellence you aspire to. Quite the opposite. The running costs of bullion are a real accomplishment in themselves. With fewer objects to manage, simplified high-availability and disaster recovery architectures, and updates without the need to halt production – for hardware, software and firmware alike… Ultimately, systems administration costs actually fall!

Forget the time when 'operational excellence' was a just another way of saying 'expensive to buy'. bullion combines all the factors that lead to a lower initial purchase price. First and foremost, the modular architecture means you only pay for what will really be used or consumed. Then bullion uses standard components to deliver a better performance/cost ratio and much greater openness. When it comes to software licensing and support costs, the fact that bullion provides the highest number of virtual machines per socket and per physical machine is great news when it comes to cutting the cost of software licenses that are billed depending on the number of sockets or physical machines involved.

Bullion, allows you to achieve unrivalled quality of service as quickly as possible

bullion actively contributes to driving business growth: it takes the brakes off project development and lets decision-makers implement the very best ideas without constraints. With its robust and modular architecture, bullion delivers unprecedented levels of availability: it is more than capable of responding to unexpected demands, and opens up the possibility of using a wider range of applications than ever before. bullion also lets you consolidate applications, while still guaranteeing optimum service quality. Meeting all the expectations of your customers within the business.

With bullion, it could not be easier to install and manage your systems

bullion allows you to cut the number of servers you have to run by a factor of ten, allowing you to implement more stable infrastructures that are capable of absorbing changing workloads while simplifying your high-availability and disaster recovery architectures.

Designed using open, standard systems, bullion integrates into existing environments with almost audacious ease! With bullion, interoperability problems are a thing of the past.

The solutions offered through Bull System Manager and VMware vCenter signal the advent of greater flexibility and foresight. You'll be more responsive than ever!

Finally, thanks to its in-depth experience in critical enterprise systems, Bull can offer you a comprehensive range of services that will enable you to reap the full benefits of your new infrastructure as quickly as possible.

For example, Bull partners can provide you with a careful analysis of the cost of ownership for your existing infrastructure, including a detailed study costs, with suggestions for improvement and architecture recommendations.

Call on Bull for the most up-to-date expertise in implementing virtualized production infrastructures, including high-availability, disaster recovery and backup/restore functions.

Bullion, a fundamental building brick of the Bio Data Center, for a greener approach to IT

As well as enabling organizations to optimize their infrastructure topology and control service quality, bullion clearly differentiates itself from all the other platforms by its capacity to manage energy consumption.

Native virtualization and resource sharing drastically reduce electricity consumption.

Its performance per watt outstrips all benchmarks: you can achieve a 30% improvement compared with a blade configuration of the same power, and 70% compared with traditional twin-socket servers.

The dynamic power management features offered by Bull System Manager reduce energy consumption depending on workload for the CPUs, fans, memory, disks and put in stand-by modes resources that are not being used. Finally, using low-energy components also reflects our aim to help you develop environmentally friendly business practices.

Bullion specifically designed for virtualization of business critical applications

Bull, guaranteeing a comprehensive infrastructure

Servers, storage, back-up, VMware, operating systems and related services: by choosing Bull, you can be sure that you are getting the best range of expertise to help you design and orchestrate your ideas, tailored to your specific needs.

Critical Applications:

Meet the four challenges of virtualization with bullion

Optimize
Your infrastructures, sustainably

Double
The capacity of your servers

Secure
Your implementations

Reduce
Your electricity consumption

Challenge 1

Despite virtualization, you infrastructure is still too complex and you have too many servers

Gradual proliferation of servers over time, heterogeneous infrastructures, operating systems that don't align with each other… all these situations, and more, can result in uncertain server reliability as well as complex and onerous systems administration, especially when there is constant pressure to implement new projects, integrate new business applications and virtualize workstations.

Now, With Extreme Consolidation...

You can deploy fewer servers, simplify their administration and optimize your infrastructures in a lasting manner. Bullion delivers:

• Totally linear performance increases from 4 to 16 CPUs and a unique guarantee of scalability because so very many VMs can be implemented on a single machine;
• Reductions of up to 70% in software infrastructure cost and lower operating costs too, because there are fewer objects and maintenance procedures to manage;
• An effective disaster recovery plan based on the most powerful technologies proposed by VMware, Red Hat and Microsoft;
• Greatly improved security thanks to the built-in redundancy of bullion components and access to 24x7 supervision from Bull's high availability center.

Challenge 2

You have already stretched the performance of your systems to the limit

You're faced with chronic performance issues that are stopping you from guaranteeing the highest levels of service quality to your users in the business. With your network at full stretch and your applications limited, you need to find new room for maneuver.

Now, With Extreme Performance...

You can effectively reconcile operational excellence and low running costs!

Because it draws on technologies from the world of High-Performance Computing (HPC), bullion has unparalleled reserves of power for a standard computer. Furthermore, it combines best-in-breed components with an architecture designed to guarantee total reliability and availability. Bullion delivers:

• Twice as much power as all other X86 servers;
• 100% memory reliability, as a result of Bull's extensive experience in the mainframe and Unix worlds;
• An ecosystem that brings together the best expertise to optimize every link in the infrastructure chain, from servers and storage to networks;
• Fast, simple implementation, with unrivaled ability to adapt to all the various components of the information system.

Challenge 3

You've reached stalemate in your attempts to virtualize your critical applications

You have made several attempts to virtualize one or more of your critical applications, on different types of architecture; but problems with performance persist. And you still have to convince the business that your approach is sound and demonstrate to them that the risks are under control.

Now, With Extreme Virtualization...

You can use all the flexibility of virtualization to implement your critical applications faster and in total security, while also providing the highest levels of service. Bullion delivers:

• VMware: Bull integrates all VMware's virtualization products and has a team of over a hundred certified experts to size servers, coordinate complex virtualization projects and carry out POCs to test your applications in a virtualized environment;
  
  
• Red Hat: Bull has teamed up with the world's leading supplier of open source solutions to integrate the market's most comprehensive Linux and virtualization distribution. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) meets the needs of companies wanting the scalability of bullion at a highly optimized total cost of ownership;
  
  
• Microsoft HyperV: Bull integrates the Hyper V hypervisor, optimized for the virtualization of critical Microsoft environments. bullion simplifies both the consolidation of SQL Server databases and the secure deployment of Exchange and Dynamics infrastructures.

Challenge 4

You are reaching the physical limits of your data center

When you no longer have any capacity to access more energy and your Data Centers are holding back your development, it is time to act. Being at full capacity leads to higher energy bills, the constant need for more investment and increasingly acute issues with cooling.

Now, With Extreme Efficiency...

You can free up space by virtualizing and optimizing all your resources! As well as optimizing infrastructure topology, bullion stands out from its competitors because of its extreme energy efficiency. Bullion delivers:

• 25% more power per m² thanks to its ultra-compact design: a hallmark of Bull;
• 30% to 70% reductions in electricity consumption, thanks to the 'Active/ Passive Power Supply' developed by Bull;
• An entire chain of optimized, low energy consumption components;
• Native virtualization and resource sharing, to drastically cut electricity consumption.

Technical Specifications:

Technical Specifications
Design
Form Factor	19" 3U per "building block" Max 4 building blocks per system
Processors
Number	2-16 sockets, max 160 cores and 320 threads
Type	Intel Xeon series E7-4800, Supports 6, 8 or 10 cores
L2 Cache	Up to 30MB shared cache
CPU/QPI RAS	QPI Self-Healing QPI on/off-lining Cores Ex-/Included Processor sockets Ex-/Included Up to 30MB shared cache
Architecture
Chipset	Intel E7 Series Chipset Bull Coherence Switch (BCS) for extension from 2 to 16x sockets BCS uses X-QPI protocol between BCS modules Intel QPI protocol between CPU sockets
Quick Path Interconnect	Max Quick Path Interconnect at 6.4GT/s. Max BCS speed at 8GT/s
Memory
Min/max	Min: 64GB, Max: 4TB (with 16GB DIMM's) in max configuration
Type	DDR3-1066MHz, DIMM 256x slots (max)
Memory slots	128x slots in max configuration 64xslots per building block
Memory RAS	Memory controller sparing DIMM sparing Memory rank sparing Memory mirroring Memory on-lining FBD Lane Failover (self-healing) Demand and Patrol scrubbing DIMM Hot Plug DIMMs can be ex-/includedxslots per building block
I/O Slots
BUS slots	4x PCIe Gen2 x16 and 20x PCIe Gen 2x8 in max configuration 1x PCIe Gen2 x16 and 5x PCIe Gen2x8 per module
Bus slots free	6x
IO RAS	8x hot plug PCIe slots in max configuration, 2x per module PCIe hot plug slots can be Excluded/Included
Storage
2.5" HDD SAS 10Krpm	146GB, 300GB
2.5" HDD SAS 15Krpm	73GB, 146GB
Maximum Internal Storage capacity	9.6TB in max configuration, 2.4TB per module (8x 300GB)
Storage Expansion Unit	EMC, NetApp, or other connected SAN support
Storage Controller
Controller for internal storage SAS/SATA RAID	Optional: SAS RAID 0,1,5,10 controller - 512MB cache & BBU
Media
2.5" Hot swap HDD (SAS)/SATA	Up to 8 hard disk drives SATA & 6 SAS per module
Video
Video Controller	Through iBMC
Video Memory	8MB
Network
Network interface controller	Optional NIC
Number of Network Ports	8x dual ports, 16x ports in a max configuration, 4x ports per building block)
Security
2-level password	Yes
Front door/Intrusion protection	Yes
Trusted Platform Module	Yes
Ports Entrees/Sorties
USB ports	2
PS/2port (mouse, keyboard)	through USB or iBMC
Ethernet port	1x Ethernet port for System Management, with:    - remote KVM over IP    - remote redirect CD/DVD over IP    - control over system at any state.
Alimentation
Hot-plug PSU	1+1 standard
Power supply number	2, redundant Passive/active power-supply solution with ultra-capacitor
Power type	80+ Platimum up to 96% efficient
Power consumption	1600watt w/PFC
Auto-sensing	110/220V 60/50Hz
Ventilation
FAN specifications	8 x Hot plug 1+1 redundant per module
Physical Specifications
Size (HxLxP)	520 (12U) x 40mm (19» wide for 750mm deep max configuration
Weight	400lbs for max configuration (100lbs per module)
Operating constraints	59°F to 86°F, gradient 27°F/h, 35% to 60%, gradient 5%/h
OS & Software
Management Software	Bull System Manager and iCare maintenance software
VMware Hypervisor	ESXi embedded or Vsphere
System Management
BMC	IPMI 2.0
Remote Management	Standard through on-board iBMC
Warranty & Services
Standard warranty	3 years on site at day+1 with CRU components
Warranty (Gold Service)	24/7 four hour response
Partner Provided Services	Installation Server consolidation, HA & DRS services, SAN Integration Services HA, Performance & capacity mgt; Integration services
Regulatory & Safety
Regulatory compliance	CE (FCC, UL)

Documentation:

Download the Bull Bullion VMware Datasheet (PDF).

Download the Bull Bullion Specsheet (PDF).

Download the Bull Bullion Brochure (PDF).

Download the Bull Bullion Critical Applications Datasheet (PDF).