IBM BladeCenter S

Lenovo BladeCenter® remains an innovative solution to running business solutions. BladeCenter builds on the Lenovo  commitment to integrating server, storage, and networking functionality with technology exchange and heterogeneous management. BladeCenter offers the ease, density, availability, affordability, and scalability that are central to the blade technology promise.

BladeCenter S combines the power of blade servers with integrated storage, all in an easy-to-use package that is designed specifically for the office and distributed enterprise environment. The BladeCenter S chassis can hold up to six blade servers, and up to 12 hot-swap 3.5-inch SAS or SATA disk drives in just 7U of rack space.

The BladeCenter S is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The BladeCenter S

Unlike the BladeCenter E and BladeCenter H chassis, the BladeCenter S is designed to operate on either 110 V or 220 V power. It is also designed to run in an office environment with the BladeCenter S Office Enablement Kit. The combination of these features means that the BladeCenter S is ideal for customers with a distributed IT infrastructure where there is no dedicated computer room.

This section lists the key features of BladeCenter S chassis.

Performance

The BladeCenter S chassis offers numerous features to boost performance and reduce costs:

• Support for the latest generation of BladeCenter blades, helping to provide performance and investment protection.
• Blade servers communicate directly to switch modules inside the BladeCenter chassis via redundant midplane links to help increase the speed and efficiency of data transfers across blade servers and networks.
• A blade server that is installed in a BladeCenter S has access to as many as four internal switches, which means that up to eight I/O ports can be enabled from each server that is installed in the chassis.

Flexibility and scalability

The BladeCenter S chassis can grow with your application requirements with these features:

• BladeCenter Virtual Fabric delivers a flexible, open, and connected infrastructure to help optimize application performance. BladeCenter supports many fabrics, including Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, iSCSI, and SAS.
• Support for both x86 servers and Power Systems™ servers in a single chassis.
• BladeCenter S can be used in either 220 V or 110 V power environments. Couple this flexibility with the office-friendly Office Enablement Kit and BladeCenter S fits well in a standard back-office environment, as well as in a data center.
• The two Disk Storage Modules support up to 24 TB of share storage that is integrated into the chassis, providing flexibility and convenience in your application design and data placement.
• The Disk Storage Modules are available either with 3.5-inch drive bays or with 2.5-inch drive bays
• A complete integrated offering is provided with space for servers, networking, and shared storage - all in one 7U modular design enclosure.
• Available Serial Pass-thru Module provides a dedicated serial port to every blade server in the chassis for the applications that need it.
• The BladeCenter server form factor has remained the same since 2002, which means that most servers that are designed for BladeCenter are supported in all BladeCenter chassis. This continuity maximizes flexibility and manageability.

Manageability and security

Powerful systems management features simplify local and remote management of the BladeCenter S chassis:

• The high degree of integration in the various BladeCenter chassis reduces the need for server components, replacing numerous fans, keyboard/video/mouse (KVM) and Ethernet cables, power supplies, external switches, and other components.
• Each BladeCenter chassis includes an Advanced Management Module (AMM). The AMM boosts administrator productivity and reduces skill level requirements, which can help reduce costs, improve overall productivity, and make administration easier.
• Unlike traditional servers and some competitive blades with a myriad of separate management tools, the AMM provides a single point of control for the solution and supports many industry-standard, open protocols.
• The AMM provides systems management capabilities, including web-based out-of-band control; virtual media support; Windows “blue screen” error capture; Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) support; and remote redirection of video, text, keyboard, and mouse for the chassis and the components that are installed in the chassis.
• IBM Systems Director remains a powerful and intelligent solution to manage BladeCenter systems with rack mount and tower servers. Systems Director exploits the hardware’s capabilities by surfacing pertinent information about your blade server. The easy-to-use wizards provide step-by-step instructions and offer automated deployment capabilities.
• IBM Fabric Manager simplifies the deployment of infrastructure connections by managing network and storage address assignments.
• Integrated industry-standard Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) in supported servers enables improved setup, configuration, and updates, and simplifies error handling.
• Integrated Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2 in supported servers enables advanced cryptographic functionality, such as digital signatures and remote attestation.

Availability and serviceability

The BladeCenter S chassis provides many features to simplify serviceability and increase system uptime:

• BladeCenter reduces the number of parts that are required to run the system. Sharing fans, power supplies, systems management, and ports means fewer parts to buy and maintain, and fewer components that can fail and cause downtime.
• Hot-swap components, such as the server, switches, power supplies, and blowers, ensures maximum uptime.
• Redundant components, such as blowers and power supplies, and available RAID support for the drives in the Disk Storage Modules (DSMs) ensures that systems can remain available even during hardware failures.
• The Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA) detects when system components (processors, memory, and hard disk drives) operate outside of standard thresholds and generates proactive alerts in advance of a possible failure, therefore increasing uptime.
• Dual independent power and signal connectors to the BladeCenter chassis midplane provide fault tolerance to increase uptime.
• Tool-less cover removal provides easy access to upgrades and serviceable parts, such as CPU, memory, and adapters.
• A standard three-year (parts and labor) limited on-site warranty affords customers peace of mind and greater potential investment protection.

Energy efficiency

The BladeCenter S chassis has an energy-efficient design with features that include the following functions:

• The BladeCenter family features the industry’s most energy-efficient design. The various BladeCenter chassis use ultra-high efficiency power supplies. BladeCenter power modules are up to 91% efficient at converting power from ac wall current to the dc power that is used inside servers. This efficiency helps save money because more of the power input for which the customer is paying is used for processing, rather than released into the data center as wasted heat.
• Environmentally tuned blower/fan modules in the chassis adjust to compensate for changing thermal characteristics. At the lower speeds, they draw less power and suffer less wear. Equally important in a crowded data center, temperature-controlled blowers and fans produce less ambient noise in the data center than if they ran constantly at full speed.
• Low-voltage Intel Xeon processors and low-voltage dual inline memory modules (DIMMs) in supported servers draw less energy to satisfy demands of power and thermally constrained data centers and telecommunication environments.
• IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager™ provides advanced power management features with actual real-time energy monitoring, reporting, and capping features.

Figure 2 shows the front of the BladeCenter S chassis.

Figure 2. Front of the BladeCenter S chassis

Figure 3 shows the rear of the BladeCenter S chassis.

Figure 3. Rear of the BladeCenter S chassis

The following table lists the standard specifications.

Table 1. Standard specifications