With a commitment to interoperability and open standards, the IBM® BladeCenter® ecosystem supports extraordinary investment protection. In fact, by opening the I/O specs for all the BladeCenter chassis, we have created an ecosystem of hundreds of BladeCenter products available from dozens of vendors—something no other blade vendor can match.
Networking
The IBM Open Fabric strategy gives BladeCenter the broadest I/O portfolio in the industry. This includes 1 GbE or 10 GbE, 4X InfiniBand, 4 Gb or 8 Gb Fibre Channel, 3 Gb or 6 Gb SAS/RAID, and FCoE products from IBM and other industry-leading vendors including Brocade, Cisco, Emulex, Mellanox, Qlogic, Voltaire and more. If you have already standardized on switches from one vendor, you don't have to rip-and-replace to implement a BladeCenter solution. And, if you haven't standardized on one vendor, you have the flexibility to choose precisely the networking solution that is right for your business.
I/O virtualization
Virtual Fabric for BladeCenter can help you break the I/O bottleneck by allowing you to allocate bandwidth where needed. Offering a full range of virtualization and convergence capabilities, the same network hardware can act as Ethernet, iSCSI, or FCoE, and bandwidth can be allocated in increments from 100 Mb to 1 Gb. And, because these products are based on open standards, they are 100 percent interoperable with your current IBM BladeCenter systems.
I/O management
BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager (BOFM) is designed to support your fabric flexibility and help you manage growth and complexity by making it easy to manage I/O, including network interconnects for up to 256 BladeCenter chassis and up to 3584 blade servers.
Expansion blades
IBM offers expansion options for BladeCenter servers that provide additional functionality, including, GPUs, I/O slots, switches, and memory DIMMs to the base blade server so that you can meet your unique requirements while maintaining the reliability, flexibility and cost advantages of your BladeCenter infrastructure.
Storage
BladeCenter systems support a range of storage options within the blades and chassis. They also work well with a range of IBM System Storage® options including System Storage SAN solutions, System Storage n Series NAS products, IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) and the IBM XIV® Storage system.
Systems management
The BladeCenter platform is supported by a range of management tools designed to help you keep your systems running efficiently. IBM Systems Director gives IT managers a single-point-of-control for the BladeCenter platform, helping reduce IT management complexity and cost.
The new Systems Director Standard Edition for IBM System x® bundles leading management capabilities for total savings and ease of deployment:
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BladeCenter HS23E
All-purpose, flexible blade server designed for energy efficiency and performance.
System x3750 M4
Exceptional flexibility and performance in a dense 2U, 4-socket design.
System x3630 M4
Affordable dual-use, dual-socket rack server.
System x3530 M4
Cost-optimized, highly dense 1U, two-socket rack server for general business.
