IBM BladeCenter LS21

The LS21 and LS41 for BladeCenter blade servers, coupled with the BladeCenter chassis, advance application serving with performance, density, and scalability.

At your command are:

• Powerful, two-way SMP-capable Opteron processors
• High-speed memory with error checking and correction (ECC)
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet connections — LS21 and two-socket LS41
• Four Gigabit Ethernet connections — four-socket LS41
• Support for SAS RAID-1 (mirroring) in 32-bit legacy mode only — LS 21 requires optional SIO blade
• Advanced high availability and systems management features

These features offer a new economical approach to the deployment of large numbers of powerful servers that require less space and fewer power resources.

These next-generation processors use one 1 GHz interprocessor HyperTransport bus.

AMD Opteron LS21 for IBM BladeCenter and AMD Opteron LS41 for IBM BladeCenter

High-performance blade server subsystems: The LS21 and LS41 for BladeCenter blade servers are high-throughput, highly scalable, two-socket and four-socket, SMP-capable, AMD Opteron-based blade servers. AMD Opteron processor cores support a 64 KB two-way set associative L1 instruction cache and a 64 KB two-way set associative L1 data cache. In addition, each core supports a 1 MB L2 cache that is 16-way set associative for both instruction and data. On a dual-core processor each processing core contains an independent set of L1 and L2 caches.

The processors used in these blades are standard- and low-power, full-performance Opteron processors. The standard AMD Opteron processors draw a maximum of 95 W. Specially manufactured low-power processors operate at 68 W or less without any performance tradeoffs. This savings in power at the processor level combined with the smarter power solution that BladeCenter delivers make these blades very attractive to clients who have limited power and cooling resources.

One AMD Opteron processor with 64-bit capability is standard on the blade servers. High-speed DDR2 SDRAM is synchronized for up to 667 MHz processor-to-memory subsystem performance.

The LS21 and LS41 for BladeCenter use the ServerWorks chipset that includes:

• ServerWorks HT-2000 HyperTransport System I/O Controller
• ServerWorks HT-1000 South Bridge

The Opteron processor includes an integrated main memory controller:

• Integrated high-performance main memory subsystem
• Maximum throughput between processors and main memory
• Processor interconnect fabric:
  • 1 GHz HyperTransport links between processor sockets for the 2.0 GHz, 2.4 GHz, and 2.6 GHz dual-core processors

The HT-2000 includes:

• Ability to bridge to two PCI-X buses
• 1 GHz HyperTransport link between boot processor and the HT-2000
• Two 8x PCI-E lanes to the expansion blade connector
• Capacity to serve as a bridge and convert transactions on the PCI-X bus to transactions on the HyperTransport bus as well as transactions on the PCI Express bus to transactions on the HyperTransport bus
• One PCI-X bus interface to the LSI 1064 SAS controller and expansion card connector
• 800 MHz HyperTransport downstream link to the HT-1000
• Independent APIC controllers per PCI-X bus interface

The HT-1000 includes:

• USB 2.0 interface
• Local on-blade service processor interface
• PCI bus interface for video controller
• PCI-X bus interface for two Broadcom 5706S Ethernet controllers
• Systems management bus, supporting Phillips I2C two-wire protocol interface
• ACPI management
• Low pin count (LPC) interface for PC87427 Server I/O device to support
  • POST/BIOS EEPROM interface
  • Serial port for serial over LAN

Additional features

• LS21 and LS41 for BladeCenter system board containing eight DIMM connectors, supporting 512 MB, 1 GB, 2 GB, or 4 GB DIMMs:
  • Up to 32 GB of system memory is supported with 4 GB DIMMs.
  • LS41 Multiprocessor expansion (MPE) unit supports eight additional DIMMs for up to 64 MB of total system memory.
  • Memory is two-way interleaved.
  • Memory sizes can be mixed (must be installed in matched pairs).
  • The Chipkill function is supported for 1 GB, 2 GB, and 4 GB DIMMs.
• SAS controller, supporting one internal SAS drive (36 or 73 GB) and up to three additional SAS drives with optional SIO blade
• Two full-duplex, dual Gigabit Ethernet PCI-X based connections, high-speed network communications to LAN clients
• Two additional full-duplex, dual Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express based connections available on LS41 with an MPE

LS21 and LS41 for BladeCenter blade servers are designed for high throughput from processor, to memory, and to bus I/O.

These features, combined with SMP capability and blade-thin density, make it an excellent choice for space-constrained environments used for:

• Web caching
• Collaboration
• Terminal serving
• Dynamic Web serving
• Firewalls
• Telecommunications
• Active directory services
• Scientific and technical computing
• Linux™ clustering

High availability and serviceability features

• Hot-swap blades enable easy access to each blade server.
• The management module interfaces with each blade server for single systems management control.

LS21 and LS41 for BladeCenter blade servers deliver on reliability and serviceability.

Features include:

• ECC DIMMs, combined with an integrated ECC memory controller, designed to correct many soft and hard single-bit memory errors, while minimizing disruption of service to LAN clients
• Chipkill memory, designed to correct up to four bits per DIMM to help keep your blade server up and running
• Memory hardware scrubbing, designed to correct soft memory errors automatically without software intervention
• ECC L2 cache processors to help improve data reliability and reduce downtime
• CPU failure recovery in SMP configurations:
  • Automatically reboots server
  • Generates alerts
• Predictive Failure Analysis^® (PFA) on memory and processors to help alert the system administrator of an imminent component failure
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet connections that support:
  • Failover, adapter fault tolerance
  • PXE 2.0 Boot Agent
  • Wake on LAN^®
  • Load balancing or teaming
• An integrated management processor that supports diagnostic, reset, POST, and auto recovery functions and monitors temperature and voltage; alerts generated when thresholds are exceeded (refer to the Limitations section for restrictions)

High density using the 8677 BladeCenter Chassis: Up to 14 blade servers can be installed in a new BladeCenter chassis. They can also be installed in an existing BladeCenter chassis at full density after an upgrade with the 2,000-watt power supply option.