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With the IBM BladeCenter, small to large customers can run
their business solutions on a tightly integrated and highly optimized all in
one platform. Blade servers are not new, they’ve been around the telecom and
other industries for years but over the years they’ve been evolved with many
new technologies. A simple view of an IBM blade server is to say they’re “all
in one” servers, housed within the innovative redundant IBM BladeCenter chassis
architecture. Every blade server is placed vertically into the chassis so you
can gain superior density.
In the chassis, you can easily put different BladeCenter
hardware components to fulfill your business and datacenter needs. Examples are network and storage switches,
power supplies and management hardware.
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Blade servers have captured industry focus because of their
modular design, which can reduce cost with a more efficient use of valuable
floor space, and its simplified management, which can help to speed up such
tasks as deploying, reprovisioning, updating, and troubleshooting hundreds of
blade servers. In addition, blade servers provide improved performance by
doubling current rack density. By integrating resources and sharing key
components, not only are costs reduced, but also availability is increased.
The most important and famous benefits of BladeCenter’s
are:
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Density: the physical orientation of blade servers and
modules within the chassis results in very efficient use of space
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Cable management: as the number of traditional-form-factor
servers increases, the number of cables required for power, networking, kvm and
management increase linearly. A full rack of IBM blade servers can require as
few as a couple of dozen cables instead of hundreds.
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Setup and configuration cost: fewer traditional servers and
less mounting hardware reduce server management and the time to build and
configure a rack of servers. This
translates to savings of management cost.
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Reliability, availability and serviceability: In contrast to
traditional rack-mounted servers, a Blade server can be replaced without the
use of tools to manipulate mounting hardware and with no need to remove cables.
You can just replace a Blade server by pull it out and put back another Blade
server in place into the chassis.
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