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BladeCenter S provides:
• A choice of installation methods — Designed for either rack or deskside use with the
optional Office Enablement Kit, it’s ideal for offices or remote/branch locations.
• Integrated compute blades, SAN storage, and switches in one chassis — In addition
to six blade servers, the BladeCenter S also supports 12 shared hot-swap 3.5-inch
SAS, SATA, or Nearline SAS HDDs, and four integrated switches (two Ethernet, plus
two Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SAS, or RAID SAS Controllers, which can enable true
shared storage).
• Six 30mm blade slots — These hot-swap slots are capable of supporting any
combination of 6 HC10/HS12/HS20/HS21/HS21 XM (Intel Xeon), LS20/LS21/LS22 (AMD
Opteron
®
), and JS12/JS21/JS22 (IBM PowerPC
®
970FX/MP) blade servers, or 3 double-
wide (60mm) LS41/LS42 blade servers or a mixture of 30mm and 60mm blades. It also
supports multiple optional 30mm Expansion Units in combination with the blade servers,
using the same blade slots. Up to six chassis can be installed in an industry-standard 42U
rack, for a total of up to 36 30mm blade servers and 72 HDDs per rack, plus switches, with
full power redundancy.
• Standard office 110V power or 220V power — Don’t have a data center, but still want to
consolidate many servers into a few? No problem. BladeCenter S runs on standard office
power (as well as 220V), using an auto-sensing power supply.
• Simplified setup and configuration — BladeCenter S’s configurable “business in a box”
foundation offers the BladeCenter Start Now Advisor, a wizard-based installation tool on a
DVD that is shipped standard with every chassis. You can be up and running in minutes. A
user can literally plug the blade servers into the system, plug the system into a power
outlet, and launch a management tool that enables easy select-and-click configuration via
an "express" install. For businesses operating branch offices—such as retailers or financial
institutions—IT administrators at headquarters can easily pre-configure hundreds of blade
systems to operate in the same manner and ship them out the door knowing an office
employee will be able to simply plug a system in and power it up.
• Forward and backward compatibility — Most blades, and every switch and passthru
module released by IBM for BladeCenter E since 2002, are supported. Many new blades
and 1X fabric switches released for IBM BladeCenter E, BladeCenter H, BladeCenter T, or
BladeCenter HT are also supported in the BladeCenter S chassis.
• One module bay for hot-swap Advanced Management Module — The management
module provides advanced systems management and KVM capabilities for not only the
chassis itself, but for all of the blades and other modules installed in the chassis. The
management module provides capabilities similar to the IBM Remote Supervisor
Adapter II used in stand-alone IBM System x
™
or IBM eServer
™
xSeries
®
rack and tower
servers. The features of the management module can be accessed either locally or
remotely across a network. One module comes standard.
• One module bay for hot-swap Serial Passthru Module — This module provides six
RJ45 serial ports (one per blade). The ports are numbered 1 through 6, and correspond to
blade slots 1 through six.
• Two bays for hot-swap Storage Modules — Each module supports up to 6 hot-swap
SAS, SATA, or Nearline SAS drives (12 total), for an internal capacity of up to 3.6TB
(using 300GB SAS HDDs) or 12TB (using 1TB SATA drives). The drives can be mixed
within a Storage Module. The drives can be shared by one or more blades. If any drives
are installed, one or two (for redundancy) SAS Connectivity Modules or the SAS RAID
Controller Modules must be installed in switch bays 3 and/or 4. (In addition, if you have
BladeCenter Storage and I/O Expansion Unit blades, which attach to the HS and LS
blades, these are supported as well.)
• Four module bays for hot-swap communication and I/O switches — The modules
interface with all of the blade servers in the chassis and eliminate the need for external
switches or expensive, cumbersome, and error-prone cabling. All connections are done
internally via the midplane. All modules, when installed in pairs, offer load balancing and
failover support. Integrated switch modules mean that no extra “U space” is required in
the rack. The first two bays support Ethernet switches only (one comes standard). The
other two bays support Ethernet, Fibre Channel, or SAS switches. Either one or two of a
kind is required in Bays 3 and 4. (No mixing and matching between the pair.)
• Four module bays for Fan Modules — Four hot-swap/redundant blower modules
come standard with the chassis. (Each module contains two fans.) They are capable of
providing efficient cooling for all blades, switches and storage devices. These modules
replace the need for each blade to contain its own fans. The four fan modules are more
energy efficient than dozens or hundreds of smaller fans would be, and they offer many
fewer points of potential failure.
• Four module bays for hot-swap Power Modules — BladeCenter S ships with two 950W
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9.