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Data Center in a Box

A detailed look at blades and how they help complete your IT environment

A detailed look at blades and how they help complete your IT environment

The IBM BladeCenter* solution is so integrated that it could be considered a data center in a box. It combines servers, I/O fabric, switches, power and cooling within the same system and can even provide storage as part of this single platform.

If you’re not familiar with the BladeCenter solution, the central element is the chassis that holds the blade servers. The chassis contains the embedded I/O fabric, or midplane, and modular bays where the rest of the components are placed. The midplane fabric consists of hard-wired connections between the blade servers in the front of the chassis to the I/O switch modules in the back, as well as to the power modules. The BladeCenter architecture allows for redundant power, cooling and I/O pathways for each blade server in the chassis.

IBM offers several BladeCenter chassis, but in this article I’ll focus on those supported by IBM i—the BladeCenter H and BladeCenter S. The BladeCenter H (see Figure 1) is an enterprise-level data center chassis with 14 blade bays and available redundant power domains, I/O bays, management modules and 10 Gb Ethernet, 4 Gb Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and serial-attached SCSI (SAS) fabric. Currently, POWER6* processor-based blade servers can use 1 Gb Ethernet, 4 Gb Fibre Channel and SAS I/O connectivity in this chassis. The BladeCenter H doesn’t include storage within the chassis; the blade servers access a storage-area network (SAN) through Fibre Channel I/O modules.

The BladeCenter S (see Figure 2) is a small-to-mid-sized business-level, branch-office chassis with six blade bays, a single power domain with available redundant 110V power modules and 1 Gb Ethernet, 4 Gb Fibre Channel and SAS fabric. The BladeCenter S includes up to 12 SAS or serial ATA disk units within the chassis. Currently, POWER6 processor-based blade servers can use 1 Gb Ethernet and SAS I/O connectivity in this chassis and support only SAS drives for their higher performance and reliability.

BladeCenter Hardware Detail

The hardware in all BladeCenter chassis is managed by a management module in a separate bay. The BladeCenter H and BladeCenter S use the Advanced Management Module (AMM). The BladeCenter H also provides redundant AMM bays. The AMM includes its own embedded operating system, x86 processor and memory, as well as Ethernet, USB, VGA and serial ports. By connecting the Ethernet port on the AMM to a LAN, an operator can start a browser session to the AMM and manage the components in the chassis. The AMM network connection is separate from any network connectivity to the blade servers through an Ethernet I/O module. A failure in the AMM doesn’t affect the status of the blade servers, except for the temporary inability to change the BladeCenter configuration. For x86-based blade servers, the AMM offers graphical system console functionality.

The media tray in the BladeCenter contains a USB DVD-ROM drive and a keyboard, video and mouse (KVM) connection, and can be shared among the blade servers. (POWER6 processor-based blades don’t use the KVM functions.)

BladeCenter JS12 and JS22

The BladeCenter JS12 (see Figure 3, page 36) is a single-socket, dual-core blade server based on the POWER6 processor. As with other POWER6 processor-based servers, the POWER6 chip in the JS12 contains 4 MB of L2 cache per core, with both cores operating at 3.8 GHz. The JS12 doesn’t have any L3 cache. The backplane on the JS12 features eight low-profile memory DIMM slots for DDR2 memory operating at 533 or 667 MHz, with a maximum capacity of 64 GB. The JS12 also shares other technology with the rest of the IBM Power* Systems servers—the system I/O hub chip, including its two Host Ethernet Adapter (HEA) ports, Flexible Service Processor, memory buffer chips and embedded SAS controller. That SAS adapter controls up to two embedded 10K RPM SAS drives on the blade itself.

Similar to current x86-architecture blades, the JS12 has both PCI-Express and PCI-X DDR I/O expansion adapter slots. The PCIe slot can support the QLogic 4 Gb Fibre/1 Gb Ethernet CFFh adapter and the PCI-X DDR slot can support the LSI SAS CFFv adapter. The JS12 has two standard multi-I/O connection ports to the midplane in the chassis. They can carry network I/O traffic from the embedded HEA ports, as well as I/O requests from the SAS CFFv expansion adapter and the embedded USB adapter on the blade. If the CFFh Fibre/Ethernet CFFh adapter is used to connect to SAN, that adapter has two separate I/O ports to the midplane that connect to the high-speed fabric in the chassis (when the JS12 is used in the BladeCenter H).

The BladeCenter JS22 blade server is similar to the JS12 but does have several important differences (see Figure 4, page 36). It’s a two-socket, quad-core blade, with each POWER6 core operating at 4.0 GHz. The JS22 supports only four standard DDR2 memory DIMMs at 533 or 667 MHz for a total available capacity of 32 GB. Only one embedded SAS drive is available on the JS22.

Once the POWER6 processor-based blade has been powered on in the chassis and VIOS has been assigned an IP address, the IVM is used for all LPAR configuration tasks.

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