IBM Blade Center

A complete mini data center for SMBs and branch offices, this blade enclosure lets you fix and remove components without the use of a screw driver

Saturday, September 06, 2008

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We received the IBM Blade Chassis with a couple of blade servers and HDDs. This Blade Chassis is called the BladeCenter S and is meant for SMBs and Branch Offices. Its key benefits are: a single rack enclosure of around 2 feet with 11U space, which can act as a complete mini datacenter for SMBs or branch office setups. This is called the BladeCenter S OfficeEnablement Kit, and gives you 4U of additional space for adding other rack mountable devices. These enclosures also help in suppressing the sound generated by the blades. We didn't run any benchmarks on the box as the results would vary with the configuration of servers and disks going to be used in the box. That's why we've done this visual tour to show what goes into a mini BladeCenter. But before that, let's try to get a feel of what all it has and what all it can do.

1 An empty Chassis connected inside the mini 2 feet rack. The speciality of this rack is that it has 4U space free for adding other network, security or storage servers in the same box.	2 IBM BladeCenter S 6-Disk Storage Module. Here you can allocate any number of disks to any blade server dynamically.

This enclosure comes with a Blade chassis that can take upto six blade servers. And for storage, it can accommodate up to 12 SAS or 12 SATA disks (with two IBM BladeCenter S 6-Disk Storage Modules) or a mix of both. It also has hot-swap and redundant switch modules which can support SAS, Gigabit Ethernet and Fiber Channel options, an inbuilt KVM and a remote management interface for configuring and accessing each and every component over IP.

3 Dummies to fill up the empty server slots, to prevent it from gathering dust.	4 DVD ROM and backup battery module. If your failsafe power also fails, then also you have those batteries to save you.

For power supply, it has four hot-swap and redundant load-balancing power supply modules, and it's designed to sustain either complete power failure of one power source or failure of any of the two SMPSes.Being an IBM product, the box truly follows the IBM toolless technology concept which means you can take out every single component from the chassis without even touching a screw driver. Even blade servers inside the chassis have been designed on the same concept.

SMS Buy 130930 to 56677.

5 Dummy to cover up space for another IBM BladeCenter S 6-Disk Storage Module.	6 IBM 146GB 15K 3.5 in HS SAS HDD connected through a hotswappable HDD chassis

7 The brains behind the box–the Blade server, with Xeon Quad Core E5405 80W 2 GHz.. It also comes with two internal 2.5 inch disks	8 This is how your BladeCenter S will look from the front, when it's fully loaded. You can see 2U empty space both at the top and at the bottom for adding devices.

9 The empty back of the BladeCenter. When the door is closed, the cabinet has the capability to reduce the sound level to 90%.	10 Four Hotswappable failsafe fans to keep your IBM BladeCenter cool. These fans also support the tool less technology from IBM.

11 Dummies to fill up empty slots. These slots can be further filled with network/SAS/VGA/ USB adapters.	12 IBM BaldeCenter S Management Network Port Model.

13 5 RJ45 network ports module. A number of such ports can be configured with any of the blade servers.	14 5 Fibre Channel network ports module. These ports can be configured with any of the blade servers.

15 VGA and USB Ports. These ports are connected with the inbuilt KVM and automatically get connected with the selected server.	16 Two failsafe SMPSes. The empty places which you see are the two slots for adding SMPSes for better failsafe options.

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