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July 2009 — There are many factors you may consider when evaluating blade servers. Here are some facts you may not know about IBM blades—the ones IBM hopes you don’t find out about.
Please consider the following:
For example, the IBM HS22 is not supported on the BladeCenter T or BladeCenter HT.
The IBM JS23 and JS43 are not supported on the BladeCenter E or BladeCenter T.
Where is the investment protection for customers with these chassis?
If the ServeRAID MR10ie is installed, the battery is installed in DIMM slot 7. Therefore DIMM slot 7 cannot be used for memory. 2
When a customer decides to run either the JS23 or JS43 blades in the BladeCenter S, BladeCenter H, or BladeCenter H-T chassis, they should be prepared to make tradeoffs. IBM does not support a fully-populated enclosure running JS23 and/or JS43 blades without running with “performance Reduction” turned on, or in ‘Basic Power” mode.4
- JS22, JS23, and JS43 blades are not supported in the BladeCenter E chassis.6
- IBM states that the blade servers LS21 and LS41 using the 95 watt version of the AMD Opteron processor (LS21-3AY, 6AY & LS41-3AY, 6AY, 3BY, 6BY) are designed for use in the BladeCenter H chassis. However, when these blade servers are placed in a BladeCenter or BladeCenter T chassis, the processors run at “n-2” speed. IBM says this results in a speed reduction of 400 MHz, in most cases.7
- The JS21 blade server with the 2.5 GHz dual core PowerPC970 processor is throttled to run at 2.3 GHz when installed in the BladeCenter or BladeCenter T. The JS21 blade server with the single core 2.7 GHz PowerPC970 processor is throttled to run at 2.6 GHz when installed in the BladeCenter E or BladeCenter T.8
- 4X Infiniband is only available in the BladeCenterH and HT.9
HP BladeSystem c-Class offers more bandwidth and headroom for the future.
A picture is worth a 1000 LEDs.
When we at HP developed Virtual Connect, we were really thinking of how to simplify the way customers connect their servers to LANs and SANs. HP’s Virtual Connect makes the server administrator self-sufficient by allowing the complete LAN and SAN connection information. Virtual Connect also allows physical connections to be moved with the workload from one server bay to another without impacting the LAN or SAN.
HP is committed to industry standard protocols. HP Virtual Connect uses native industry-standard Ethernet and Fibre Channel protocols. This allows it to attach to any industry standard Ethernet or NPIV enabled fibre channel switch from vendors such as HP ProCurve, Brocade, Blade Network Technologies, and Cisco.
Discover more about HP Virtual Connect Technology.
Bottom-line: HP BladeSystem c-Class infrastructure offers flexibility and scalability, and requires no compromise. It takes advantage of the best technologies across HP—innovations that make everything from NonStop servers to HP printers the best in the industry—and brings them together to fundamentally improve how customers buy, manage and use their computing resources.
Find out more about the HP BladeSystem.
