Item specifics
- Manufacturer IBM
- Model IBM - BladeCenter E Chassis
- Product Type Blade Enclosure
- Form Factor Blade Enclosure
- Announced 9-Feb-06
- Available 7-Mar-06
- Archived
- Rack Units 7U
- Max Blades 14
- Max Blades/Rack 84
- Switch Technology Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, SAS
- Maximum Interconnect Modules 4
- Dimensions Height: 30.42 cm (11.98 in) Width: 44.4 cm (17.48 in) Depth: 71.12 cm (28 in)
- Weight 108.86 kg (240 lbs)
- Max Power (Calculated) 263 W (1,515 CO2e kg pa)
- Max Power (Theoretical) 6,958 W (40,082 CO2e kg pa)
- Max Heat (Calculated) 946 kJ/hr (897 Btu/hr)
- Max Heat (Theoretical) 25,034 kJ/hr (23,727 Btu/hr)
- Hot-Swap/Redundant Cooling Fans Yes/Yes
- Hot-Swap/Redundant Power Supply Yes/Yes
- System Management IBM Cool Blue Active Energy Manager, IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager, IBM Rear Door Heat Exchanger, IBM Open Fabric, IBM Director System Availability, IBM Remote Deployment Manager, Light path diagnostics self-diagnosis panel, Predictive Failure Analysis
- Warranty 30 Days (Dafault), 1, 2 & 3 Years (Upgradable)
Product Description
Introduction
Lenovo BladeCenter® remains an innovative solution to running business solutions. BladeCenter E efficiently integrates servers, storage, networking, I/O, and applications, enabling organizations to build flexible IT infrastructures by using common building blocks. In 7U of rack space, the BladeCenter E chassis can contain up to 14 blade servers, four switch modules, and four power supplies to provide the necessary I/O network switching, power, and cooling to support the individual servers.
Figure 1 shows the BladeCenter E.
Figure 1. The BladeCenter E
Did you know?
BladeCenter E delivers extreme density, energy efficiency, and reliability for space- and power-constrained enterprise IT environments.
The chassis supports up to four traditional fabrics by using networking switches, storage switches, or pass-through devices. The chassis offers light path diagnostics, one front USB input, and an optical drive.
Key features
This section lists the key features of the BladeCenter E chassis.
Scalability and performance
The BladeCenter E chassis offers numerous features to boost performance and improve scalability:
- Up to 14 servers with support for the latest generation of BladeCenter blades, which helps provide performance and investment protection.
- IBM Virtual Fabric offers up to four I/O ports on a single-wide blade and up to four I/O modules in a single chassis, with the choice of Ethernet, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and SAS connectivity.
- BladeCenter E supports port speeds up to 8 Gbps.
- BladeCenter E provides up to 288 Gbps of external uplink bandwidth (full-duplex) with up to four IBM 1/10Gb Uplink Ethernet switches.
- A flexible and scalable architecture with integrated servers and networking, storage, and management infrastructure supports your growing business needs.
Manageability and security
Powerful systems management features simplify local and remote management of the BladeCenter E chassis:
- The high degree of integration in the BladeCenter E chassis reduces the need for server components, replacing numerous fans, KVM and Ethernet cables, power supplies, external switches, and other components.
- The BladeCenter E chassis includes the 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 by providing a single point of control for the solution. The AMM supports many industry-standard open protocols.
- The AMM provides extensive security features, including role-based user authentication and access control, LDAP support, and SSH and SSL protocols for secure remote systems management.
- IBM Systems Director remains a powerful and intelligent solution to manage BladeCenter systems along side rack mount and tower servers. Systems Director uses 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.
Availability and serviceability
The BladeCenter E chassis provides many features to simplify serviceability and increase system uptime:
- BladeCenter reduces the number of parts that are required to run the system. By sharing fans, power supplies, systems management, and ports, there are fewer parts to buy and maintain, and fewer components that can fail and cause downtime.
- Hot-swap components, such as the server, switches, power modules, and blowers, ensure maximum uptime.
- Redundant components, such as blowers and power modules, ensure that systems can remain available even during hardware maintenance windows and failures.
- The Predictive Failure Analysis (PFA) detects when the system components operate outside of the standard thresholds and generates proactive alerts in advance of possible failure, therefore increasing uptime.
- Dual independent power and signal connectors to the BladeCenter E chassis midplane provide fault tolerance to increase uptime.
- The light path diagnostics panel and individual light path LEDs quickly lead the technician to failed (or failing) components. These features simplify servicing, speed up problem resolution, and improve system availability.
- Three-year customer replaceable unit and onsite limited warranty, with next business day 9x5, provides an additional peace of mind.
Energy efficiency
The BladeCenter E chassis offers the following energy-efficient features to save energy, reduce operational costs, increase energy availability, and contribute to a green environment:
- Energy-efficient components and the component-sharing design of the BladeCenter chassis provides ultimate power and cooling savings.
- The BladeCenter E helps reduce energy costs with high-efficiency power supplies.
- The BladeCenter E uses hexagonal ventilation holes, a part of the IBM Calibrated Vectored Cooling™ technology. Hexagonal holes can be grouped more densely than round holes, providing a more efficient airflow through the system, which helps reduce cooling costs.
- IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager™ provides advanced power management features with actual real-time energy monitoring, reporting, and capping features.
Locations of key components
Figure 2 shows the front of the BladeCenter E chassis.
Figure 2. Front of the BladeCenter E chassis
Figure 3 shows the rear of the BladeCenter E chassis.
Figure 3. Rear of the BladeCenter E chassis
Standard specifications
Table 1 lists the standard specifications of the BladeCenter E chassis.
| Components | Specification |
| Machine type | x-config: 8677. |
| Form factor | 7U rack-mounted unit. |
| Server bays | 14. |
| Servers supported | Intel Xeon processor-based HS12, HS22, HS22V, HS23, and HS23E servers IBM POWER® processor-based PS700 servers Certain older BladeCenter servers |
| Standard I/O bays | Four (Bays 1 - 4). Support for 1 Gb Ethernet, 4 Gb and 8 Gb Fibre Channel, and 3 Gb SAS I/O modules. |
| Connectivity type | Ethernet, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and SAS. |
| Management modules | Up to two redundant hot-swap Advanced Management Modules (AMM): One AMM standard, the second AMM optional. |
| Optical drive bays | One. Support for an optional DVD-ROM or multi-burner. |
| Ports | AMM: One DB-15 video port, two USB 2.0 ports for keyboard and
mouse, one RJ-45 serial port, one RJ-45 10/100 Mb Ethernet port for
remote management. Front: One USB 2.0 port. |
| Cooling | IBM Calibrated Vectored Cooling with two redundant hot-swap blower modules. |
| Power modules | Up to four redundant hot-swap 2000 W or 2320 W power modules support two power domains; redundancy is provided within a pair in the same power domain. Power modules 1 and 2 supply power to server bays 1 - 6; power modules 3 and 4 supply power to server bays 7 - 14. (See the "Power modules" section for details.) |
| Hot-swap parts | Servers, I/O modules, management modules, power modules, and blowers. |
| Systems management | AMM, light path diagnostics, Predictive Failure Analysis, IBM Systems Director, and IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager. Remote presence (graphics, keyboard and mouse, and virtual media) through AMM. |
| Security features | Role-based user security, LDAP, SSH, and SSL. |
| Limited warranty | Three-year customer-replaceable unit and onsite limited warranty with 9x5/next business day response time. |
| Service and support | Optional service upgrades are available through IBM ServicePacs: 9x5 or 24x7 4-hour or 2-hour response time, 1-year or 2-year warranty extension, remote technical support for IBM hardware and selected IBM and third-party (Microsoft, Linux, VMware) software. |
| Dimensions | Height: 304 mm (12.0 in.), width: 444 mm (17.5 in.), depth: 711 mm (28.0 in.). |
| Weight | Minimum: 39 kg (85 lb), maximum 102 kg (225 lb). |