Datasheet

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Outstanding performance
density
BladeCenter provides an efficient
use of data center floor space with
up to 84 2-way blades or up to 42
4-way blades in an industry-
standard (42U) rack. The efficient
design features leading-edge
cooling technology and the latest
Intel Xeon™, Intel Xeon Processor
MP and PowerPC® 970 processors.
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Affordable availability for your
mission-critical applications
Chassis features, such as high-
availability midplanes and redun-
dant hot-swap cooling and power,
help reduce single points of failure.
This is part of the OnForever™
features—designed to deliver out-
standing operation, helping to
increase your productivity. Tight
integration of key components such
as networking services, centralized
management and applications help
to enable high availability.
Application flexibility
BladeCenter architecture is based on
industry standards to better support
the deployment of third-party software
and hardware technologies. IBM
works with industry-leading tech-
nology companies to support innova-
tive solutions running on Linux,
Windows® and Novell operating
systems.
Customers using BladeCenter can
take advantage of the flexibility
provided by the Linux operating
system. Linux offers power, function-
ality, high security and reliability for
business and infrastructure applica-
tions, and is strongly supported on
BladeCenter.
BladeCenter supports the Microsoft®
Windows Server 2003 and Windows
2000 operating systems enabling cus-
tomers to migrate existing or deploy
new Windows environments on this
platform. The unique advantages
offered by BladeCenter combined
with the broad array of applications
supported on Windows deliver a valu-
able proposition for customers.
Designed to solve real-world problems
The BladeCenter design addresses
your most serious issues: space con-
straints, manageability, scalability,
capacity, performance, cooling and
power. BladeCenter servers are
designed to take less time to install,
fewer people to maintain and cost
less than a traditional server solution,
helping reduce IT infrastructure costs.
Integrating both Intel processor-
based and POWER processor-based
blade servers, BladeCenter collapses
the data center by integrating func-
tions such as Layer 2-7 Ethernet and
your Storage Area Network (SAN)
fabric into an efficient 7U enclosure
that simplifies deployment and
management.
Your enterprise can benefit from sim-
plified management, fast installation
and deployment, modular scalability
and high availability. What’s more,
BladeCenter delivers improved space
efficiency when compared to most of
today’s 1U solutions.
BladeCenter solutions make adding
capacity simple and affordable.
BladeCenter’s technology features
deliver an effective scale-out archi-
tecture that lets you add server mod-
ules quickly using a “pay as you
grow” approach.