IBM BladeCenter Chassis

A cost-effective blade chassis with a slim form factor

The IBM eServer BladeCenter chassis provides a cost-effective but intelligent approach to blade server computing. This blade server chassis includes advanced software tools and technologies to reduce the cost of computing by reducing management requirements as well as power and cooling costs, on a reliable platform that is easy to troubleshoot and deploy.

Features of the IBM BladeCenter Chassis includes:

• a 7U form factor which provides better compute density than many 1U products
• space for up to 14 hot-swappable blade servers
• up to 4 hot-swappable, redundant switch modules that support Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet protocols
• modular technology that supports Intel® processor-based, POWER™ processor-based, and AMD Opteron™ processor-based blade servers
• support for a wide variety of operating systems

The BladeCenter Chassis includes an ePlane that ensures maximum uptime with fault-tolerance, as well as investment protection by allowing you to upgrade to new technologies without sacrificing your original IT investment. In addition, the IBM BladeCenter Chassis includes IBM’s XpandOnDemand™ capability allows you to “pay as you grow” and purchase server capability as you need it.

IBM Director™

The IBM BladeCenter chassis includes IBM Director, a set of management tools that deliver advanced, proactive management capabilities to maximize IT staff productivity and provide rock-solid reliability. In addition, the included, easy-to-use Deployment Wizard automates deployment of computing resources.

The IBM BladeCenter chassis includes an optional IBM Director Server Plus Pack, which includes tools to automate deployment of systems, and a capacity manager to monitor critical server resources to identify bottlenecks, and proactively recommend upgrades and enhancements to maintain server performance and uptimes. These tools provide intelligent systems management and support system availability by allowing you to measure planned v.s. unplanned outages to demonstrate the benefits of ownership.

Availability Features

Light path diagnostics provide you with a quick and easy way to troubleshoot your blade server infrastructure, maximizing uptime and availability. Light path diagnostics provide LEDs in the front and rear of the chassis so administrators can easily troubleshoot the system for maximum availability.

Calibrated Vectored Cooling™ maintains the health of your system by keeping components cool, so you can maximize compute density. This unique technology also protects critical system components to maximize reliability.

Other availability features include:

• redundant midplane - adds fault tolerance to I/O
• Predictive Failure Analysis® - decreases unplanned downtime
• redundant components - dual hot-swappable cooling & power units

Start Configuring Your Blade Server Solution Today

North American Systems’ extensive IBM experience and experience with the Blade platform makes us an ideal partner to work with for those who are looking to pilot or expand their blade server projects and deployment. Our systems engineers can provide in-depth technical insight and expertise, to help you configure a system that meets business requirements while reducing infrastructure costs.

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