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6 BladeSymphony 1000 Architecture White Paper www.hitachi.com
Chapter 2
System Architecture Overview
BladeSymphony 1000 features a very modular design to maximize flexibility and reliability. System
elements are redundant and hot-swappable so the system can be easily expanded without downtime
or unnecessary disruption to service levels. The key components of the system, illustrated in Figure 2,
consist of:
• Server Blades — Up to eight depending on module, available with Intel Xeon or Itanium processors
• Storage Modules — up to two modules supporting either three or six SCSI drives
• I/O Modules — available with PCI-X slots, PCIe slots, or Embedded Fibre Channel Switch, up to two
modules per chassis
• Small footprint chassis containing a passive backplane — eliminates a number of FC and network
cables
• Redundant Power Modules — up to four hot-swap (2+1 or 2+2) modules per chassis for high
reliability and availability
• Redundant Cooling Fan Modules — four hot-swap (3+1) per chassis standard configuration for high
reliability and availability
• Switch & Management Modules — hot-pluggable system management board, up to two modules
per system for high reliability and availability
Figure 2. Key BladeSymphony 1000 components
The server blades and I/O modules are joined together through a high speed backplane. Two types of
server blades are available: Intel Xeon Server Blade and Intel Itanium Server Blade. A 10 RU
BladeSymphony 1000 server chassis can accommodate eight server blades of these types. It can also
accommodate a mixture of server blades, as well as storage modules. In addition, multiple Intel
Itanium Server Blades can be combined to build multiple Symmetric Multi Processor (SMP)
configurations. Figure 3 shows a logical diagram of modules interconnecting on the backplane for a
possible configuration with one SMP server and one Intel Xeon server, as well as various options for
hard drive and I/O modules.
Server blade
Cooling fan module
I/O module
Backplane
Power module
Storage module
Switch &
management
module