IBM BladeCenters - Open, Easy And Green

Here at Computer Merchants we, like IBM, have noticed the growth over time in the Blades and BladeCenter market.

Many of you have heard about blades, in fact, many of you are probably running blades. However for those of you wanting to know more about this new technology, please read on!

What is a BladeCenter Blade Server?

The term Blade Server refers to a thin, ultra dense enclosure that houses microprocessors, memory, disk, networking and other features. Multiple blade servers are inserted into a rack mounted chassis called the BladeCenter.

Normally with a typical server you would find power supplies, ethernet connections, cooling, media optical drives and other ports. The BladeCenter provides this functionality as well as a connection between the blades to achieve redundancy, high reliability and increased density.

Importantly, the IBM BladeCenter offers energy efficient designs and powerful IBM “cool blue” tools to help plan, monitor, control and allocate power consumption and cooling.

Chassis

BladeCenter S

The IBM BladeCenter S is designed for small and medium sized offices with limited IT skills needs. Its target is to be simplistic and economic. It does this by being small enough to fit under a desk and its ability to run by plugging into an average wall power socket. One of the main advantages of this chassis is that it offers disk storage (up to 12 disks) so that no separate external disk storage needs to be purchased.

BladeCenter E

The IBM BladeCenter E is tailored towards space and power constrained data centres. This chassis holds up to 14 blade servers and is 7U high. The BladeCenter E has an extremely dense design and is up to 11% more efficient in power and cooling than its main competition.

BladeCenter H

The H Chassis is IBM’s high performance blade. The 9U rack houses 14 blades and is fully compatible using the same blades and switches with the entire family of BladeCenter systems. It also supports industry standard I/O switches from Cisco, Brocade and others so you are able to have more choice and flexibility for your environment.

It achieves high speed connectivity through 4 x10GB ethernet and rich telecom functionality. It also has the ability to increase bandwidth and throughput for demanding applications such as IPTV, VoD, IMS and security.

BladeCenter T

This model was designed by IBM to meet the rugged needs of the telecom industry. The T chassis is NEBS 3/ETSI compliant and meets standards for electromagnetic compatibility, thermal robustness, fire resistance, earthquake and office vibration resistance and airborne contaminant resistance!

Another feature is optional hot-swappable redundant AC or DC power supplies and cooling and built-in systems management resources in a 20″ deep chassis. The chassis is 8U rack optimised and houses up to 8 Blade Servers.

BladeCenter HT

This is IBM’s Telco version of the BladeCenter HT and is the correct choice for the ultimate combination of high performance and durability in telco, military, medical, government and industrial scenarios. Again this model is available with AC or DC power as well as high speed switching with multi terabit networking, 10Gbps switch fabric.

The BladeCenter HT is the largest in size being 12U, it houses 12 Blade Servers.

Blade Servers

The most common blade servers available from IBM are split into 3 areas:

• Intel Based,
• AMD Based, and
• Power Based.

Below is a quick overview of some of the Blade Servers available.

Intel Based

HS12 - 1-socket single, dual or quad-core Intel® Xeon®
HS21 - 2-socket dual-core or quad-core Intel® Xeon

AMD Based

LS21 - 2-socket dual-core AMD Opteron
LS22 - 2-socket quad-core AMD Opteron
LS41 - 4-socket dual-core AMD Opteron
LS42 - 4-socket quad-core AMD Opteron

POWER Based - Runs AIX , OS/400 and Linux for Power

JS12 - 1-socket dual-core 64-bit IBM POWER6^TM with AltiVec^TM SIMD accelerator
JS21 - 2-socket single-core or dual-core 64-bit IBM PowerPC® 970MP with AltiVec SIMD accelerator
JS22 - 2-socket dual-core 64-bit IBM POWER6^TM with AltiVec^TM SIMD accelerator