Compare Blade Servers. Learn the benefits of IBM BladeCenter compared to competitive Blade servers.
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How does your system stack up against IBM BladeCenter?
| IBM | Dell | HP | Sun | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
Chassis flexibility Provides a variety of chassis offerings to meet your specific needs BladeCenter S, BladeCenter E, BladeCenter H, BladeCenter T, BladeCenter HT, Common set of blades, switches, I/O fabrics and management infrastructure |
PowerEdge M1000e |
BladeSystem p-Class BladeSystem c-Class carrier grade |
Sun Blade 8000 Netra CT900 ATCA |
|
Blade server flexibility Provides a large selection of blades optimized for specific workloads Intel® Xeon®, AMD Opteron, IBM POWER™ |
Intel Xeon AMD Opteron |
Intel Xeon AMD Opteron Intel Itanium® |
Sun SPARC Intel Xeon AMD Opteron |
|
Legacy I/O support Provides a more seamless transition from industry-standard rack and/or tower servers to blade servers PCI Expansion Module |
-- | -- PCI Expansion Module, (c-Class only) |
-- |
|
Next-generation local storage Helps improve reliability Solid state drives |
-- | -- | -- |
|
Storage flexibility Provides choices to meet your specific storage needs External: NAS, FC SAN, iSCSI SAN, SAS SAN Internal: Solid state, Flash, SAS, SATA [3] |
External: NAS, FC SAN, iSCSI SAN Internal: SAS, SATA |
External: NAS, FC SAN, iSCSI SAN, SAS Internal: Flash, SAS, SATA, Solid State |
External: NAS, FC SAN, iSCSI SAN Internal: SAS, SATA |
|
Redundancy Helps provide end-to-end high availability IBM designs its blades with redundant connections and its chassis with a redundant-path midplane |
-- | -- | -- |
|
Illuminated path to blade components Helps improve reliability by identifying a component in need of maintenance — even without system power Light path diagnostics |
-- No light path on the blades |
-- No light path on the blades |
-- |
|
Event identification Helps simplify problem determination First Failure Data Capture |
-- | -- | -- |
|
Integrated 10Gb Ethernet switch modules Delivers highest Ethernet bandwidth between the blade, the chassis and the network BladeCenter H, BladeCenter HT |
-- | c-Class | -- |
|
Integrated layer 2/7 Ethernet Delivers integrated application and server load balancing, plus simplicity and cost savings |
-- | -- | -- |
|
Integrated 4X InfiniBand® switch modules Provides a high-speed, low latency interconnect enabling I/O virtualization and HPC Two ports/card, managed |
Announced | Two ports/card unmanaged | Two ports/card, pass-through |
|
Blade deployment and redeployment Helps reduce the time it takes to deploy servers, data and storage to minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. Open Fabric Manager, Uses standard switches, single login across 100 chassis |
-- | Virtual Connect, Uses proprietary switches, single login across four chassis | -- |
1 BladeCenter E holds 14 servers in 7U of rack space. You can only get seven 1U rack servers in 7U of rack space.
2 Based on IBM power engineering test data. Numbers are average worst case for P6 Burn exerciser program. Like Intel configurations tested in IBM lab. Blade power is average power of total chassis solution
3 Available on IBM BladeCenter S.
4 Based on Web blade configuration.
Information based on competitor Web sites as of January 2008.
IBM, BladeCenter, ClusterProven, POWER, ServerProven and Systems Director Active Energy Manager are trademarks of the International Business Machines Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. For a complete list of IBM trademarks, see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.
Cell Broadband Engine is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. in the United States, other countries, or both. AMD and Opteron are trademarks or registered trademark of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., in the United States, other countries, or both. InfiniBand is a registered trademark of the InfiniBand Trade Association. Intel, Itanium and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States or other countries. Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.
All other products may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
© 2008 International Business Machines Corporation. All rights reserved. IBM hardware products are manufactured from new parts, or new and serviceable used parts. Regardless, our warranty terms apply. For a copy of applicable product warranties, write to: Warranty Information, P.O. Box 12195, RTP, NC 27709, Attn: Dept. JDJA/B203. IBM makes no representation or warranty regarding third-party products or services including those designated as ServerProven® or ClusterProven®.
IBM may not offer the products, services or features discussed in this document in other countries, and the information may be subject to change without notice. Consult your local IBM business contact for information on the product or services available in your area. Information about non-IBM products is obtained from the manufacturers of those products or their published announcements. IBM has not tested those products and cannot confirm the performance, compatibility, or any other claims related to non-IBM products. Questions on the capabilities of non-IBM products should be addressed to the suppliers of those products.
All statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.
The information could include technical inaccuracies or typographical errors. Changes are periodically made to the information herein; these changes will be incorporated in new editions of the publication. IBM may make improvements and/or changes in the product(s) and/or the program(s) described in this publication at any time without notice.
Any references in this information to non-IBM Web sites are provided for convenience only and do not in any manner serve as an endorsement of those Web sites. The materials at those Web sites are not part of the materials for this IBM product and use of those Web sites is at your own risk.
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