Tag Archives: IBM

The IBM BladeCenter S Is Going to the Super Bowl

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave in Eastern Europe, you know by now that the New Orleans Saints are headed to the Super Bowl.  According to IBM, this is all due to the Saints having an IBM BladeCenter S running their business.  Okay, well, I’m sure there’s other reasons, like having stellar tallent, but let’s take a look at what IBM did for the Saints.

Other than the obvious threat of having to relocate or evacuate due to the weather, the Saints’ constant travel required them to search for a portable IT solution that would make it easier to quickly set up operations in another city.  The Saints were a long-time IBM customer, so they looked at the IBM BladeCenter S for this solution, and it worked great.  (I’m going to review the BladeCenter S below, so keep reading.)  The Saints consolidated 20 physical servers onto the BladeCenter S, virtualizing the environment with VMware.   Although the specific configuration of their blade environment is not disclosed, IBM reports that the Saints are using 1 terabyte of built-in storage, which enables the Saints to go on the road with the essential files (scouting reports, financial apps, player stats, etc) and tools the coaches and the staff need.  In fact, in the IBM Case Study video, the Assistant Director of IT for the New Orleans Saints, Jody Barbier, says, “The Blade Center S definitely can make the trip with us if we go to the Super Bowl.”  I guess we’ll see.  Be looking for the IBM Marketing engine to jump on this bandwagon in the next few days.

A Look at the IBM BladeCenter S
The IBM BladeCenter S is a 7u high (click image on left for larger view of details) chassis that has the ability to hold 6 blade servers and up to 12 disk drives held in Disk Storage Modules located on the left and right of the blade server bays.  The chassis has the option to either segment the disk drives to an individual blade server, or the option to create a RAID volume and allow all of the servers to access the data.  As of this writing, the drive options for the Disk Storage Module are: 146GB, 300GB, 450GB SAS, 750GB and 1TB Near-Line SAS and 750GB and 1TB SATA.  Depending on your application needs, you could have up to 12TB of local storage for 6 servers.  That’s pretty impressive, but wait, there’s more!  As I reported a few weeks ago, there’s is a substantial rumour that there is a forthcoming option to use 2.5″ drives.  This would enable the ability to have up to 24 drives (12 per Disk Storage Module.)  Although that would provide more spindles, the current capacities of 2.5″ drives aren’t quite to the capacities of the 3.5″ drives.  Again, that’s just “rumour” – IBM has not disclosed whether that option is coming (but it is…)

IBM BladeCenter – Rear View
I love pictures – so I’ve attached an image of the BladeCenter S, as seen from the back.  A few key points to make note of:
110v Capable – yes, this can run on the average office power.  That’s the idea behind it.  If you have a small closet or an area near a desk, you can plug this bad boy in.   That being said, I always recommend calculating the power with IBM’s Power Configurator to make sure your design doesn’t exceed what 110v can handle.  Yes, this box will run on 220v as well.  Also, the power supplies are auto-sensing so there’s no worry about having to buy different power supplies based on your needs.

I/O Modules – if you are familar with the IBM BladeCenter or IBM BladeCenter H I/O architecture, you’ll know that the design is redundant, with dual paths.  With the IBM BladeCenter S, this isn’t the case.   As you can see below, the onboard network adapters (NICs) both are mapped to the I/O module in Bay #1.  The expansion card is mapped to Bay #3 and 4 and the high speed card slot (CFF-h) is mapped to I/O Bay 2.  Yes, this design put I/O Bays 1 and 2 as single points of failure (since both paths connect intothe module bay), however when you look at the typical small office or branch office environment that the IBM BladeCenter S is designed for, you’ll realize that very rarely do they have redundant network fabrics – so this is no different.

Another key point here is that I/O Bays 3 and 4 are connected to the Disk Storage Modules mentioned above.  In order for a blade server to access the external disks in the Disk Storage Module bays, the blade server must:

a) have a SAS Expansion or Connectivity card installed in the expansion card slot
b) have 1 or 2 SAS Connectivity or RAID modules attached in Bays 3 and 4

This means that there is currently no way to use the local drives (in the Disk Storage Modules) and have external access to a fibre storage array.

BladeCenter S Office Enablement Kit
Finally – I wanted to show you the optional Office Enablement Kit.  This is an 11U enclosure that is based on IBM’s NetBay 11.  It has security doors and special acoustics and air filtration to suit office environements.  The Kit features:
*an acoustical module (to lower the sound of the environment)  Check out this YouTube video for details.
* a locking door
* 4U of extra space (for other devices)
* wheels

There is also an optional Air Contaminant Filter that is available that assists in keeping the IBM BladeCenter S functional in a dusty environment (i.e. shops or production floors) using air filters.

If the BladeCenter S is going to be used in an environment without a rack (i.e. broom closet) or in a mobile environment (i.e. going to the Super Bowl) the Office Enablement Kit is a necessary addition.

So, hopefully, you can now see the value that the New Orleans Saints saw in the IBM BladeCenter S for their flexible, mobile IT needs.  Good luck in the Super Bowl, Saints.  I know that IBM will be rooting for you.

Weta Digital, Production House for AVATAR, Donates IBM Blade Servers to Schools

Weta Digital, the digital production house that designed the hit movie AVATAR recently donated about 300 IBM HS20 blade servers to Whitireia Community Polytechnic in Porirua which will use them to help teach students how to create 3-D animations. The IBM HS20 blade servers were originally bought to produce special effects for The Lord of the Rings at a cost of more than $1 million (for more details on this, check out this November 2004 article from DigitalArtsOnline.co.uk.) Weta Digital has since replaced them with more powerful HP BL 2x220c G5 servers supplied by Hewlett-Packard, which were used for AVATAR.

According to the school, these older IBM blade servers will help the schoolexpand its graphics and information technology courses and turn out students with more experience of 3-D rendering.

Thanks to Stuff.co.nz for the information mentioned above.

UNVEILED: First Blade Server Based on Intel Nehalem EX

The first blade server with the upcoming Intel Nehalem EX processor has finally been unveiled.  While it is known that IBM will be releasing a 2 or 4 socket blade server with the Nehalem EX, no other vendor has revealed plans up until now.  SGI recently announced they will be offering the Nehelem EX on their Altix® UV platform. 

Touted as a “The World’s Fastest Supercomputer”, the UV line features the fifth generation of the SGI NUMAlink interconnect, which offers up a whopping 15 GB/sec transfer rate, as well as direct access up to 16 TB of shared memory. The system will have the ability to be configured with up to 2048 Nehalem-EX cores (via 256 processors, or 128 blades) in a single federation with a single global address space.

According to the SGI website, the UV will come in two flavors:

SGI Altix UV 1000

Altix UV 1000  – designed for maximum scalability, this system ships as a fully integrated cabinet-level solution with up to 256 sockets (2,048 cores) and 16TB of shared memory in four racks.

Altix UV 100 (not pictured) – same design as the UV 1000, but designed for the mid-range market;  based on an industry-standard 19″ rackmount 3U form factor. Altix UV 100 scales to 96 sockets (768 cores) and 6TB of shared memory in two racks.

SGI has given quite a bit of techinical information about these servers in this whitepaper, including details about the Nehalem EX architecture that I haven’t even seen from Intel.  SGI has also published several customer testimonials, including one from the University of Tennessee – so check it out here.

Hopefully, this is just the first of many announcements to come around the Intel Nehalem EX processor.

Interesting HP Server Facts (from IDC)

As you can see from my blog title, I try to focus on “all things blade servers”, however I came across this bit of information that I thought would be fun to blog.  An upfront warning – this is an HP biased blog post, so sorry for those of you who are Cisco, Dell or IBM fans.

Market research firm, IDC released a quarterly update to their Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, citing market share figures for the 3rd calendar quarter of 2009 (3Q09).  From this report, there are a few fun HP server facts (thanks to HP for passing these facts along to me:)

HP is the #1 vendor in worldwide server shipments for the 30th consecutive quarter (7.5 years). HP shipped more than 1 out of every 3 servers worldwide and captured 36.5 percent total unit shipment share.

According to IDC:

  • HP shipped over 161,000 more servers than #2 Dell.
  • HP shipped 2.6 times as many servers as #3 IBM
  • 9.0 times as #4 Fujitsu
  • 12.9 times as many as #5 Sun.
  • HP ended up in a statistical tie with IBM for #1 in total server revenue market share with 30.9 percent.  This includes all server (UNIX and x86 revenues.)

HP leads the blade server market, with a 50.7 percent revenue share, and a 47.7 percent unit share.

I blogged about this in early December (see this link for details),but it’s no surprise that HP is leading the pack in blade sales.  Their field sales team is actively promoting blades for nearly every server opportunity and they continue to make innovative additions to their blades (like 10Gb NICs standard on G6 blades.)   HP Integrity blades claimed the #1 position in revenue share for the RISC+EPIC blade segment with a 53.2 percent share gaining 1.8 points year over year.

For the 53rd consecutive quarter, more than 13 years, HP ProLiant is the x86 server market share leader in both factory revenue and units, shipping more than 1 out of every 3 servers in this market with a 36.9 percent unit share.

HP’s x86 revenue share was 14.6 points higher than its nearest competitor; Dell. HP’s x86 revenue share was 19.2 percentage points higher than IBM.

 For the 3 major operating environments UNIX®, Windows and Linux combined (representing 99.3 percent of all servers shipped worldwide), HP is number 1 worldwide in server unit shipment and revenue market share.

HP holds a 36.5 percent unit market share worldwide, which is 2.6 times more than IBM’s unit market share and 12.9 times the unit share of Sun.

HP holds a 35.4 percent revenue market share worldwide which is 2.2 times the revenue share of Dell and 4.0 times the revenue share of Sun.

FINAL NOTE:  All of the following market share figures are for the 3rd quarter (unless otherwise noted) and represent worldwide results as reported by the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker for Q309, December 2009.

IBM BladeCenter Rumours

I recently heard some rumours about IBM’s BladeCenter products that I thought I would share – but FIRST let me be clear:  this is purely speculation, I have no definitive information from IBM so this may be false info, but my source is pretty credible, so…

4 Socket Nehalem EX Blade
I posted a few weeks ago my speculation IBM’s announcement that they WILL have a 4 socket blade based on the upcoming Intel Nehalem EX processor (https://bladesmadesimple.com/2009/09/ibm-announces-4-socket-intel-blade-server/) – so today I got a bit of an update on this server.

Rumour 1:  It appears IBM may call it the HS43 (not HS42 like I first thought.) I’m not sure why IBM would skip the “HS42” nomenclature, but I guess it doesn’t really matter.  This is rumoured to be released in March 2010.

Rumour 2:  It seems that I was right in that the 4 socket offering will be a double-wide server, however it appears IBM is working with Intel to provide a 2 socket Intel Nehalem EX blade as the foundation of the HS43.   This means that you could start with a 2 socket blade, then “snap-on” a second to make it a 4 socket offering – but wait, there’s more…  It seems that IBM is going to enable these blade servers to grow to up to 8 sockets via snapping on 4 x 2 socket servers together.  If my earlier speculations (https://bladesmadesimple.com/2009/09/ibm-announces-4-socket-intel-blade-server/) are accurate and each 2 socket blade module has 12 DIMMs, this means you could have an 8 socket, 64 cores, 96 DIMM, 1.5TB of RAM (using 16GB per DIMM slot) all in a single BladeCenter chassis.  This, of course, would take up 4 blade server slots.  Now the obvious question around this bit of news is WHY would anyone do this?  The current BladeCenter H only holds 14 servers so you would only be able to get 3 of these monster servers into a chassis.  Feel free to offer up some comments on what you think about this.

Rumour 3: IBM’s BladeCenter S chassis currently uses local drives that are 3.5″.  The industry is obviously moving to smaller 2.5″ drives, so it’s only natural that the BladeCenter S drive cage will need to be updated to provide 2.5″ drives.  Rumour is that this is coming in April 2010 and it will offer up to 24 x 2.5″ SAS or SATA drives.  

Rumour 4:  What’s missing from the BladeCenter S right now that HP currently offers?  A tape drive.  Rumour has it that IBM will be adding a “TS Family” tape drive offering to the BladeCenter S in upcoming months.  This makes total sense and is well-needed.  Customers buying the BladeCenter S are typically smaller offices or branch offices, so using a local backup device is a critical component to insuring data protection.  I’m not sure if this will be in the form of taking up a blade slot (like HP’s model) or it will be a replacement for one of the 2 drive cages.  I would imagine it will be the latter since the BladeCenter S architecture allows for all servers to connect to the drive cages, but we’ll see.

That’s all I have.  I’ll continue to keep you updated as I hear rumours or news.

Cisco Wants IBM’s Blade Servers??

In an unusual move Tuesday, Cisco CEO, John Chambers, commented that Cisco is still open to a blade server “partnership” with IBM.  “I still firmly believe that it’s in IBM’s best interests to work with us. That door will always be open,” Chambers told the audience at the Cisco’s financial analyst conference yesterday at Cisco’s HQ in San Jose. 

John Chambers and other executives spent much of the day talking with financial analysts about Cisco’s goal to become the preeminent IT and communications vendor because of the growing importance of virtualization, collaboration and video, a move demonstrated by their recent partnership announcement with EMC and VMware.  According to reports, analysts at the event said they think Chambers is sincere about his willingness to work with IBM. The two companies have much in common, such as their enterprise customer base, and Cisco’s products could fit into IBM’s offerings, said Mark Sue of RBC Capital Markets.

So – is this just a move for Cisco to tighten their relationship with IBM in the hopes of growing to an entity that can defeat HP and their BladeSystem sales, or has Cisco decided that the server market is best left to manufacturers who have been selling servers for 20+ years?  What are your thoughts?  Please feel free to leave some comments and let me know.

IDC Q3 2009 Report: Blade Servers are Growing, HP Leads in Shares

IDC reported on Wednesday that blade server sales for Q3 2009 returned to quarterly revenue growth with factory revenues increasing 1.2% year over year.  However there was a 14.0% year-over-year shipment decline.  Overall blade servers accounted for $1.4 billion in Q3 2009 which represented 13.6% of the overall server revenue.  Of the top 5 OEM blade manufacturers, IBM experienced the strongest blade growth gaining 6.0 points of market share.  However, overall market share for Q3 2009 still belongs to HP with 50.7%, with IBM following up with 29.4% and Dell in 3rd place with a lowly 8.9% revenue share.Q3_2009_Blades According to Jed Scaramella, senior research analyst in IDC's Datacenter and Enterprise Server group,  "Customers are leveraging blade technologies to optimize their environments in response to the pressure of the economic downturn and tighter budgets. Blade technologies provide IT organizations the capability to simplify their IT while improving asset utilization, IT flexibility, and energy efficiency.  For the second consecutive quarter, the blade segment increased in revenue on a quarter-to-quarter basis, while simultaneously increasing their average sales value (ASV). This was driven by next generation processors (Intel Nehalem) and a greater amount of memory, which customers are utilizing for more virtualization deployments. IDC sees virtualization and blades are closely associated technologies that drive dynamic IT for the future datacenter."

IBM Helps Use Blade Servers to Fight Fires

WildfiresOn Thursday, IBM plans to announce its work with university researchers to instantly process data for wildfire prediction — changing the delay time from every six hours to real-time. This will not only help firefighters control the blaze more efficiently, but deliver more informed decisions on public evacuations and health warnings.

The new joint project with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County allows for researches to analyze smoke patterns during wildfires by instantly processing the massive amounts of data available from drone aircraft, high-resolution satellite imagery and air-quality sensors, to develop more effective models for smoke dissipation using a cluster of IBM BladeCenters and IBM InfoSphere Streamsanalytics.   Today analysis of smoke patterns is limited to weather forecasting data, observations from front line workers and low resolution satellite imagery.  This new ability will provide fire and public safety officials with a real-time assessment of smoke patterns during a fire, which will allow them to make more informed decisions on public evacuations and health warnings.

Researchers expect to have a prototype of this new system available by next year.

IBM BladeCenter HS22 Delivers Best SPECweb2005 Score Ever Achieved by a Blade Server

HS22According to IBM’s System x and BladeCenter x86 Server Blog, the IBM BladeCenter HS22 server has posted the best SPECweb2005 score ever from a blade server.  With a SPECweb2005 supermetric score of 75,155, IBM has reached a benchmark seen by no other blade yet to-date.  The SPECweb2005 benchmark is designed to be a neutral, equal benchmark for evaluting the peformance of web servers.  According to the IBM blog, the score is derived from three different workloads measured:

  • SPECweb2005_Banking – 109,200 simultaneous sessions
  • SPECweb2005_Ecommerce – 134,472 simultaneous sessions
  • SPECweb2005_Support – 64,064 simultaneous sessions

The HS22 achieved these results using two Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X5570 (2.93GHz with 256KB L2 cache per core and 8MB L3 cache per processor—2 processors/8 cores/8 threads). The HS22 was also configured with 96GB of memory, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux® 5.4 operating system, IBM J9 Java® Virtual Machine, 64-bit Accoria Rock Web Server 1.4.9 (x86_64) HTTPS software, and Accoria Rock JSP/Servlet Container 1.3.2 (x86_64).

It’s important to note that these results have not yet been “approved” by SPEC, the group who posts the results, but as soon as they are, they’ll be published at at http://www.spec.org/osg/web2005

The IBM HS22 is IBM’s most popular blade server with the following specs:

  • up to  2 x Intel 5500 Processors
  • 12 memory slots for a current maximum of 96Gb of RAM
  • 2 hot swap hard drive slots capable of running RAID 1 (SAS or SATA)
  • 2 PCI Express connectors for I/O expansion cards (NICs, Fibre HBAs, 10Gb Ethernet, CNA, etc)
  • Internal USB slot for running VMware ESXi
  • Remote management
  • Redundant connectivity

ibm_hs22_nehalem_blade

(UPDATED) Officially Announced: IBM’s Nexus 4000 Switch: 4001I (PART 2)

I’ve gotten a lot of response from my first post, “REVEALED: IBM’s Nexus 4000 Switch: 4001I” and more information is coming out quickly so I decided to post a part 2. IBM officially announced the switch on October 20, 2009, so here’s some additional information:

  • The Nexus 4001I Switch for the IBM BladeCenter is part # 46M6071 and has a list price of $12,999 (U.S.) each
  • In order for the Nexus 4001I switch for the IBM BladeCenter to connect to an upstream FCoE switch, an additional software purchase is required. This item will be part # strong>49Y9983, “Software Upgrade License for Cisco Nexus 4001I.” This license upgrade allows for the Nexus 4001I to handle FCoE traffic. It has a U.S. list price of $3,899
  • The Cisco Nexus 4001I for the IBM BladeCenter will be compatible with the following blade server expansion cards
    • 2/4 Port Ethernet Expansion Card, part # 44W4479
    • NetXen 10Gb Ethernet Expansion Card, part # 39Y9271
    • Broadcom 2-port 10Gb Ethernet Exp. Card, part # 44W4466
    • Broadcom 4-port 10Gb Ethernet Exp. Card, part # 44W4465
    • Broadcom 10 Gb Gen 2 2-port Ethernet Exp. Card, part # 46M6168
    • Broadcom 10 Gb Gen 2 4-port Ethernet Exp. Card, part # 46M6164
    • QLogic 2-port 10Gb Converged Network Adapter, part # 42C1830
  • (UPDATED 10/22/09) The newly announced Emulex Virtual Adapter WILL NOT work with the Nexus 4001I IN VIRTUAL NIC (vNIC) mode.  It will work in pNIC mode according to IBM.

The Cisco Nexus 4001I switch for the IBM BladeCenter is a new approach to getting converged network traffic. As I posted a few weeks ago in my post, “How IBM’s BladeCenter works with BladeCenter H Diagram 6 x 10Gb UplinksCisco Nexus 5000” before the Nexus 4001I was announced, in order to get your blade servers to communicate with a Cisco Nexus 5000, you had to use a CNA,and a 10Gb Pass-Thru Module as shown on the left. The pass-thru module used in that solution requires for a direct connection to be made from the pass-thru module to the Cisco Nexus 5000 for every blade server that requires connectivity. This means for 14 blade servers, 14 connections are required to the Cisco Nexus 5000. This solution definitely works – it just eats up 14 Nexus 5000 ports. At $4,999 list (U.S.), plus the cost of the GBICs, the “pass-thru” scenario may be a good solution for budget conscious environments.

In comparison, with the IBM Nexus 4001I switch, we now can have as few as 1 uplink to the Cisco Nexus 5000 from the Nexus 4001I switch. This allows you to have more open ports on the Cisco Nexus 5000 for connections to other IBM Bladecenters with Nexus 4001I switches, or to allow connectivity from your rack based servers with CNAs.

Bottom line: the Cisco Nexus 4001I switch will reduce your port requirements on your Cisco Nexus 5000 or Nexus 7000 switch by allowing up to 14 servers to uplink via 1 port on the Nexus 4001I.

For more details on the IBM Nexus 4001I switch, I encourage you to go to the newly released IBM Redbook for the Nexus 4001I Switch.