* IBM enhances its blade server systems
IBM announced a variety of enhancements recently to its blade server products that increase not only their performance, but also their scalability and versatility.
The company announced it is adding two small form-factor SCSI drives to the HS20 BladeCenter servers, as well as five new HS20s, which run at 2.8 GHz to 3.6 GHz and use Xeon processors. The new servers also use Intel’s EM64T technology, which lets them run both 32- and 64-bit applications.
The SCSI capability allows as many as 14 SCSI blades to reside in a BladeCenter chassis and hold 83% more data than the IDE drives that prior BladeCenters used.
Each blade can now mirror the operating system, allowing it to attach to a storage-area network.
IBM has also added the ability for customers to add two hot-swappable SCSI drives to the BladeCenter HS20 and has doubled the number of Ethernet or Fibre Channel connections per blade. HS20 blades can now support eight Ethernet or four Fibre Channel connections.
The company also enhanced its Power processor-based blades by adding support for the AIX 5L V5.2 operating system.
The new, faster BladeCenter JS20s are 37% faster than previous models, according to IBM’s claims. The JS20s also include Single Instruction Multiple Data instructions, to increase performance in floating-point applications such as bioinformatics, financial services applications or seismic imaging.
Further, IBM is announcing software that manages the power consumption of the BladeCenter. Called PowerExecutive, the product evaluates each blade’s power usage and compiles an inventory of the overall consumption of all the blades and enclosures in use.
The company also enhanced its UpdateExpress installation/update tool by offering a single interface that can be accessed through IBM Director.
The BladeCenter HS20 system is available now, starting at $2,040. The BladeCenter JS20 system is expected to be available Oct. 29, starting at $2,700.
