IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud

Highlights

• Integrated virtualisation platform with converged networking, virtualised servers, storage and management
• Arrives presized and preconfigured from the factory
• Easy to order and deploy
• Reduce complexity and risk
• Scale easily from virtualisation platform today to a cloud platform tomorrow.

Fast and reliable path to virtualisation

Virtualising your data centre 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 virtualised data centre, it comes with converged networking, virtualised servers, storage and available start-up services to help you take the guesswork out of establishing a virtualised data centre 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 virtualised environment – including great performance, unmatched reliability, rapid scaling, high resiliency and exceptional network bandwidth capacity as well as excellent virtualisation technology from VMware. BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud is available in multiple configuration sizes to meet your organisation’s specific needs.

Maximise capital usage for greater savings

Virtualised data centres built upon the BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud can help drive down your total cost of ownership (TCO) 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 some competitor offerings and enables the rapid movement of VM images, combined with a reduced cost of connectivity by up to 44 percent compared to traditional rack servers.¹ Energy smart design and integrated power management capabilities help drive optimal utilisation 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 virtualisation helps create a simplified, flexible IT environment that can save up to half of your valuable data centre space while allowing you to more effectively use fewer resources. Storage virtualisation is supported via the optional addition of IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), which also helps to increase management efficiency and resource utilisation of heterogeneous storage assets.

¹ Based on IBM comparisons of 14-server connectivity costs of IBM Blade Centre servers to 14-server connectivity costs of Hewlett-Packard rack servers from price information available on ibm.com (US) and hp.com (link resides outside of ibm.com) as of February 1, 2011.