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BladeCenter H Chassis

IBM BladeCenter S Big benefits for the small office

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Highlights

  • Delivers high performance, energy efficiency and versatility to run the most demanding applications in larger data centers
  • Reduces energy bill with leadership high-efficiency power supplies that are 94 percent efficient and 80 PLUS® Platinum Certified1
  • Provides more than 12 percent greater performance per watt compared to the competition2
  • Protects your investment by being compatible with the entire IBM BladeCenter® family

In today's high-demand enterprise environment, organizations need a reliable infrastructure to run compute-intensive applications with minimal maintenance and downtime. IBM BladeCenter H is a powerful platform built with the enterprise customer in mind, providing industry-leading performance, innovative architecture and a solid foundation for virtualization.

Powerful performance

This next-generation chassis is a workhorse—it runs applications quickly and efficiently, enabling organizations to maximize their investment and succeed in a highly competitive market. The powerful BladeCenter H delivers the performance customers need to make informed decisions.


Product features

  • New ultra-efficient power supplies (94% efficient and 80 PLUS Platinum Certified¹) and cooling enhancements to support most demanding high-performance blade servers
  • Leadership energy efficiency and enterprise high performance
  • Open and easy management tools deliver advanced, proactive management, providing rich and broad systems management capabilities
  • Predictive Failure Analysis helps save you time and money by decreasing unplanned downtime
  • Calibrated Vectored Cooling™ helps maintain the health of your system by keeping internal components cool

Hardware summary

  • 9U rack-optimized chassis
  • Up to 14 blade server bays
  • Up to four legacy, four high-speed and four bridge module bays supporting Virtual Fabric, FcOE,10 Gb Ethernet, 8 Gb Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and more
  • Up to four 2980 W hot-swap and redundant load-balancing power supply modules
  • High-availability midplane helps enable maximum uptime and investment protection for future technologies

Feature Benefits
Dense, space-saving 9U chassis
  • With 14 server bays, this enclosure allows you to pack up to 112 quad-core processors into an industry-standard rack.
  • Highly integrated IT infrastructure simplifies the deployment, provisioning and management of servers as well as network and storage switch fabrics.
  • Support for five blade families including Intel®, AMD Opteron™, IBM POWER® and Cell Broadband Engine™ processors and workstation blades. Allows you to select the blades based on targeted application workloads.
  • Virtualization capability allows you to "virtualize everything" for a more flexible, better utilized, and potentially lower-cost IT infrastructure with a common management construct.
  • Innovative design reduces cables by up to 80% compared to rack servers, helping you save on installation time and cable costs.
  • Extensive compatibility with the entire family of BladeCenter® blades, switches and ecosystem partnership offerings.
IBM Cool Blue® technology
  • Helps you plan, manage and control power and cooling in the data center—helping to build greener infrastructures.
  • The web-based IBM System x® and BladeCenter Power Configurator accurately predicts the power and cooling required for specific configurations thereby enabling realistic planning of the proper power and cooling infrastructure.
  • IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager™ tool tracks actual power usage, temperatures and heat emitted, and tracks these items over time so you can actively manage power and cooling with real information.
  • Active Energy Manager also will help you manage through power incidents (e.g., brownouts, supply failures) so users can avoid outages due to power and cooling issues.
  • Active Energy Manager also provides the capability to cap and allocate power, as required. This capability helps maximize server usage within a restricted power envelope.
  • The IBM Rear Door Heat Exchanger can help address hot spots in the data center by managing heat at the rack level.
Energy-efficient design
  • Industry-leading power supply efficiency.
  • BladeCenter uses power supplies that are 94% efficient and 80 PLUS Platinum Certified, so less energy is wasted as heat and more power is available for the chassis and servers to use than with typical power supplies.
  • BladeCenter H supports a broad portfolio of low-voltage processor options, helping customers to lower their power usage without sacrificing performance.1
  • Blower/fan modules in the chassis adjust to compensate for changing thermal characteristics. At the lower speeds they draw less power.
IBM Open Fabric
  • Delivers a flexible, open, connected infrastructure to help optimize application performance.
  • BladeCenter H supports a wide array of fabrics including: Virtual Fabric, FcOE, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and iSCSI.
  • Virtual Fabric for ultimate combination of I/O performance and flexibility
  • Helps centralize storage, including boot capability, which can dramatically reduce the effect of a disk outage on an application.
  • Wide variety of connectivity choices including the industry's only integrated 10 Gigabit Ethernet solution for blade servers plus 10 Gigabit iSCSI support for Linux®.
Powerful solutions management
  • Provides intelligent systems management for rock-solid reliability.
  • Exploits hardware capabilities by surfacing pertinent information about your blade server.
  • Easy-to-use Deployment Wizard provides step-by-step installation instructions with automated deployment capabilities.
  • Advanced Management Module provides more robust hardware running Linux and supports many industry-standard, open protocols.
  • BladeCenter H comes standard with one Advanced Management Module; a second is available as an option for redundancy.
High-availability midplane
  • Provides fault-tolerant, redundant connections from the blade servers through the midplane to modular components in the chassis.
  • Flexibly designed midplane provides support for you to upgrade to new technologies as your needs change.
Hot-swap, redundant management, switch, power supply and blower modules
  • Provides a single point of control for managing the entire solution helping to maximize system reliability and availability.
  • IBM management capabilities can help boost administrator productivity.
  • Uniquely designed Calibrated Vectored Cooling™ technology helps protect critical system components to help drive maximum reliability.
  • Supports a wide selection of integrated switching components from industry-leading ecosystem provider companies such as Cisco, Nortel, Brocade, QLogic and McDATA.
  • Optional 10 Gb Ethernet switch modules provide high-speed Ethernet communication between blade servers, management modules and external hardware.
  • Optional Fibre Channel switch modules deliver a highly available cost-effective storage network, including support for IBM System Storage® SAN and NAS.
  • Supports up to four 2980 W high-efficiency power supplies with load-balancing and failover capabilities, providing additional reliability and protection.
  • Each power supply includes a customer- replaceable fan pack to keep the power supplies running at peak performance.
  • Easy transition for customers already deploying BladeCenter.
High-speed switch module support
  • BladeCenter H supports all the fabrics that BladeCenter customers are used to seeing, including up to four 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 4X InfiniBand connected fabrics.
  • 10 Gb Ethernet and 4X InfiniBand deliver low-latency and high-throughput access all the way down to each blade.
High-speed bridge module bays
  • Bridge modules allow customers to create a high-speed fabric between BladeCenter H chassis and to virtualize that single fabric into their traditional Ethernet and fabric interconnects.
  • Allows for I/O consolidation and virtualization across multiple chassis making it even easier to scale as solution needs change.
Advanced server management
  • Supports IBM Director System Availability to accurately measure planned vs. unplanned outages.
  • Supports IBM Director Capacity Manager to monitor critical server resources, identify and predicts bottlenecks and recommend upgrades to minimize diminished network performance.
  • Supports IBM Director Rack Manager to conveniently configure and monitor rack components and provide health information.
IBM Remote Deployment Manager
  • Simplifies and automates deployment and redeployment for efficient installation and setup of your blade servers.
  • Performs deployment tasks via the network that previously required a visit to each system, saving your administrator valuable time.
  • Supports all Wake on LAN and Pre-boot eXecution Environment (PXE)-enabled products.
Light path diagnostics self-diagnosis panel
  • LEDs located on the front and rear of the system provide a quick and easy guide to troubleshoot your server, to help increase system uptime.
Predictive Failure Analysis
  • Helps save you time and money by minimizing unplanned downtime.
  • Helps increase uptime by allowing you to receive proactive alerts and take corrective action, in some cases hours before actual failure.
Three-year customer replaceable unit and onsite limited warranty
  • IBM Global Services organization provides reliable, dedicated and skilled assistance when you need it.
  • Offers peace of mind for an extended period of time.

1 Some machines are designed with a power management capability to provide customers with the maximum uptime possible for their systems. In extended thermal conditions, rather than shutdown completely, or fail, these machines automatically reduces the frequency of the processor to maintain acceptable thermal levels.


Form factor/height Rack-mount chassis/9U
Blade bays Up to 14
Switch modules Up to four traditional, up to four high-speed, and up to four bridge module bays
Power supply module Up to four hot-swap and redundant 2980 W ac high-efficiency power supplies with load-balancing and failover capabilities. Operating at 200-240 V
Cooling modules Two hot-swap and redundant blowers standard, additional fan packs on power supplies
Systems management hardware Advanced Management Module standard; add an optional Advanced Management Module for redundancy
I/O ports USB-based keyboard, video, mouse (KVM), Ethernet, USB
Media Two USB connections and an optional DVD multiburner
Systems management software Systems management and trial deployment tools
Predictive Failure Analysis Internal storage, processors, blowers, memory
Light path diagnostics Blade server, processor, memory, power supplies, blowers, switch module, management module, internal storage and expansion card
Limited warranty Three-year customer replaceable unit and onsite limited warranty
External storage Support for IBM System Storage® solutions (Including DS and NAS family of products) and many widely adopted non-IBM storage offerings

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