IBM dramatically extends the value and industry-leading capabilities of the IBM BladeCenter® family, with the IBM BladeCenter H platform. With a design that's both intelligent and simple, the BladeCenter H platform is a powerful blade-computing chassis designed to provide increased performance and deliver many new capabilities for telecommunications equipment manufacturers, service providers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators.
Technology innovation that matters to the telecommunications industry
The IBM BladeCenter H platform delivers up to 1Tbps total bandwidth through a new high-speed 10 Gbps fabric. It maintains compatibility with the BladeCenter family of products by using common building blocks of servers, switches, storage and other components. This makes it an excellent choice for running emerging next-generation network (NGN) applications and enhanced management tools. Simplify network administration and staffing while enabling significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Supporting today's and tomorrow's infrastructures
The IBM BladeCenter H platform delivers added performance by supporting current and upcoming generations of dual- and quad-core blade servers, including Intel®, AMD and IBM PowerPC® processor-based servers. These servers are designed to support emerging and demanding NGN applications, such as Internet Protocol television (IPTV), video on demand (VoD), IP multimedia subsystems (IMS) and security.
Service providers can take full advantage of the scalability and operational flexibility of the BladeCenter H platform by running–on a single chassis–many different applications on many different operating systems, including Solaris 10. Service providers can choose the applications and operating systems they need to deliver new services efficiently and quickly.
Highlights
- High performance computing interconnects and switching. The BladeCenter H platform enables network bandwidth up to 10 times greater than previous generations of equipment, making it ideal for compute- and input/output (I/O) - intensive NGN applications. The processing breakthrough increases the internal capability of the new system by delivering more than 40 Gb (4x10 Gbps) of I/O bandwidth to every blade server, providing increased processing power and responsiveness.
- Foundation for NGN applications. The BladeCenter family is unique in today’s market by providing unmatched operational flexibility for converged telecom and enterprise networks while using a common set of components. BladeCenter, BladeCenter T and BladeCenter H technology have all been designed to coexist synergistically with other telecom industry architectures, such as the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA). This is especially important for telecommunications companies that have invested in ATCA technology for transport plane network elements, and want to leverage the capabilities of BladeCenter technology to achieve economies of scale for the entire telecommunications network.
- Cost-effectiveness. The BladeCenter H platform is an integrated system architecture, providing a large portfolio of off-the-shelf solutions and applications for NGN environments. The BladeCenter family architecture enables telecommunications providers to take advantage of lower TCO, capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating expenditures (OPEX).
- Increased scalability and density. The BladeCenter H platform provides enhanced growth for your NGN applications with support for 14 blades per chassis and up to 56 servers per telco rack. The high density of the BladeCenter H platform extends the ability of the BladeCenter family to scale, consolidate existing and new workloads efficiently, and save valuable floor space through a reduced footprint compared to traditional rack servers.
- Investment protection. The BladeCenter H platform is fully compatible with other BladeCenter systems, using the same blades and switches. This can help provide investment protection and seamless growth.
- A foundation for virtualization. While virtualization is nothing new to the BladeCenter family, the BladeCenter H platform takes it to the next level by enabling server, storage and I/O sharing across multiple chassis of blades. This makes the BladeCenter H platform suited for even the most-demanding telecommunications environments, for activities such as new service rollout and provisioning.
- Infrastructure management. The BladeCenter H platform provides integrated management tools and enhanced autonomic and virtualization capabilities through IBM Director. This helps simplify administration and reduce costs associated with supporting multiple disparate servers and operating systems, including maintenance, licensing, floor space and other overhead.
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