Blade servers take application serving to the cutting edge of performance, density, and scalability. At your
command are powerful, dual socket dual-core or quad-core Intel based blades, two-way SMP-capable Intel® Xeon (four-way in the LS41),
PowerPC 970 processors or AMD Opteron processors, high-speed memory, gigabit Ethernet controllers, and advanced high-availability
and systems management features. Best of all, they provide a new economic approach to the deployment of large numbers of powerful
servers and can help use reduced space and power resources.
The IBM BladeCenter is a 7U or 9U chassis, rack-optimized unit designed to support extremely high-density blade
servers with up to six units in a 42U rack. They represent a new approach to the deployment of application servers where two- or four-way,
SMP-capable Xeon processing, high-availability design, systems management, and easy setup features are combined in an extremely dense
package. It contains the following features:
- 14 hot-swap blade server bays
- Four hot-swap redundant 2,000-watt power modules on the standard chassis
- Two, hot-swap redundant blowers - Support cooling requirements for full configurations
- Advanced Management Module
- Controls systems management of the enclosure and installed blades
- Interface to control KVM, DVD-ROM, or diskette activity for each blade server
- Multiple switch module bays - Supports installation of Ethernet or Fibre channel networks
- Control panel - Contains USB port and status LEDs
- Contains a highly available midplane supporting the hot-swap of individual blades
BladeCenter architecture offers extremely high-density configurations that can be deployed to address datacenters needs for powerful,
high density, highly available servers while reducing power requirements, cabling complexity and overall systems management. All of
this will help reduce the total cost of ownership, reduce deployment costs, and allow more efficient use of valuable floor space. In
addition, blade servers can provide improved performance by potentially doubling current rack density, thereby permitting companies to
integrate their resources and share key components. This can result in both cost reductions and increased availability.
We recommend the use of blade servers for the following situations:
- Space constrained environments
- WebSphere®
- Linux® clusters
- Web caching
- Collaboration applications (Lotus® Notes®, Microsoft® Exchange and Citrix)
- Dynamic Web serving - Load balancing
- Firewall
- Telecommunications
- Active directory services
- Scientific and technical computing
These applications are typically processor and memory intensive, which lend themselves to the scale out option around which the
BladeCenter technology is centered.
