IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud

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Highlights

  • Comprehensive virtualization platform with converged networking, servers, storage and management
  • High return on Investment platform, large virtual machine capacity in a simple-to-manage package
  • Fast and easy to order and deploy with tested configurations
  • Reduce complexity and risk with best practices high availability designed in
  • Energizes new performance and technology into existing datacenters and opens easy pathway to cloud
  • Integrated virtualization platform with converged networking, virtualized servers, storage and management.
  • Arrives presized and preconfigured from the factory
  • Easy to order and deploy
  • Reduce complexity and risk
  • Scale easily from virtualization platform today to a cloud platform tomorrow

Fast and reliable path to virtualization

Virtualizing your data center offers many potential benefits including reduced upfront capital and operating costs. Yet the challenges of installing and configuring a virtual environment can sometimes be overwhelming. Reduce complexity and risk with IBM BladeCenter® Foundation for Cloud. It provides the flexibility needed to make this easy with preintegrated systems and a preloaded management system. Comprehensively designed with everything needed to deploy a high-performance, reliable and scalable fully virtualized data center, it comes with, converged networking, virtualized servers, storage and available start-up services to help you take the guesswork out of establishing a virtualized data center environment. BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud can help you get up and running in days, not weeks. This solution is built by combining the strength of the IBM System x® platform and the advantages of the latest BladeCenter capabilities in the virtualized environment—including great performance, unmatched reliability, rapid scaling, high resiliency and leading network bandwidth capacity as well as industry-leading virtualization technology from VMware. BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud is available in multiple configuration sizes to meet your organization’s specific needs.

Maximize capital usage for greater savings

Virtualized data centers built upon the BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud can help drive down your total cost of ownership by enabling you to more effectively manage and leverage your capital investments in IT assets. Based on BladeCenter systems, it provides a large network bandwidth capacity that exceeds competitor offerings and enables the rapid movement of virtual machine images, combined with a reduced cost of connectivity by up to 40 percent compared to traditional rack servers.1 Energy-smart design and integrated power management capabilities help drive optimal utilization of valuable power and cooling resources. With greater visibility into key energy metrics across your IT assets, you can identify areas where energy consumption can be reduced. Built-in virtualization helps create a simplified, flexible IT environment that can save up to half of your valuable data center space while allowing you to more effectively use fewer resources. Storage virtualization is supported via the optional addition of IBM System Storage® SAN Volume Controller, which also helps to increase management efficiency and resource utilization of heterogeneous storage assets.

Product features

  • Presized and preintegrated virtualization infrastructure
  • Modular design that can scale easily
  • Integrated management server
  • Integrated converged networking
  • Integrated virtualized servers
  • Presized storage configurations
  • Interoperability with existing environment with networking flexibility
  • Optimized for VMware, but can support any hypervisor

Hardware summary

  • Converged networking: Choice of IBM, Cisco or Brocade
  • Chassis: BladeCenter H
  • Blade servers: Choice of HS23*, HX5 and HX5+MAX5
  • Systems management: IBM Systems Director 6.3

1 Based on IBM comparisons of 14-server connectivity costs of IBM BladeCenter servers to 14-server connectivity costs of Hewlett-Packard rack servers from price information available on ibm.com and hp.com as of February 27, 2013.
* Included in predefined configurations that can be easily ordered directly from IBM.

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    IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud

    Learn how BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud delivers a comprehensive solution for virtualization and cloud computing.

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