Ref; IT pro

Enterprise Blade Servers

Using blade servers can help you improve both data centre resource utilisation and effectiveness, and IT PRO has exclusively reviewed and tested four of the latest blade server products.

[b][/b]

On test:

[b]IBM BladeCentre H[/b]

[b]Fujitsu Siemens PRIMERGY BX600 S2[/b]

[b]HP Blade System c-Class[/b]

[b]Dell PowerEdge 1955[/b]

Many data centres and service providers find the appeal of rack servers undeniable as these slim-line packages offer high processing densities allowing [b]businesses[/b] to maximize their server room floor space. However, more and more are now becoming aware of the side effects of massively dense rack cabinets. In the drive to reduce running costs many businesses are looking at the effects on their IT budgets of power consumption and utility costs and these concerns extend to heat output per rack and the amount of air conditioning required for cool running.

Blade servers may have been introduced over five years ago as high processing density alternatives to rack server but their other benefits are now making them look a more sensible choice where rising costs are a big issue. Businesses are now less concerned about processing density and more concerned about the number of servers within a particular power envelope for a given rack size. To cater for this blade server design has evolved over the past couple of years and the focus has been moving away from sheer processing power to other areas such as reduced power consumption and heat output.

Cooling has been made more efficient as the chassis features have been developed so fans can be removed from the server blades themselves thus freeing up more space for memory, storage and faster processors. This has added benefits as a rack full of blade servers will have fewer moving parts and the chassis can deliver high levels of cooling and power redundancy. Rising supports costs are another consideration and blade servers have the facilities to provide better centralised management and easier deployment.

In this group test we take a closer look at the four big players in the blade server market and bring you in-depth reviews of the very latest systems from Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HP and IBM. Having followed blade server development since its early days it has been interesting to see that these four blue chips now have the UK and European market pretty much sewn up. Blade server development is a costly business and many other vendors have either tried their hand briefly or simply stayed well away. Bizarrely, NEC came in a couple of years ago with its Express5800 blade system but a design fault on it UK web site meant that the product isn't currently being made available to this market. Tiawanese manufacturer Supermicro has been threatening to deliver a blade server for years but nothing has ever materialised whilst others such as Tatung and Nexcom have an insignificant or non-existent presence in this neck of the woods.

As you'll see in this group test, the four participants haven't rested in their laurels and are continuing to develop blade server technology with some impressive results. The latest dual-core Xeon and Opteron processors provide significant benefits and all four systems offer support for both of these with a resultant increase in processing density. And you're not tied to one technology either as blades allow you to mix and match processing requirements as demand dictates. Storage options continue to improve and many blades support the latest low-profile SAS and SATA hard disks with RAID as a standard feature. Connectivity options have come a long way as well with basic Gigabit Ethernet switching now complimented with 4Gbps fibre channel and in some cases even 10-Gigabit options.

Businesses faced with spiralling costs of managing and maintaining data centres and hosted services need to look closer at blade servers as they can be a better alternative to rack servers. Even with a relatively small number of vendors in this market there's still a huge range of choices available and we give you the low-down on the top four systems currently available.

Enterprise Blade Servers

Using blade servers can help you improve both data centre resource utilisation and effectiveness, and IT PRO has exclusively reviewed and tested four of the latest blade server products.

Group Test Winner

Product: HP Blade System c-Class
Company: Hewlett - Packard
Price: £2,421
Rating:
Verdict: A superbly designed system with masses of fault tolerance, plenty of server options and quality management features - blade server technology simply doesn't get any better than this.

IBM BladeCentre H Company: IBM Price: £3,568 Rating:

Fujitsu Siemens PRIMERGY BX600 S2 Company: Fujitsu Siemens Price: £2,826 Rating:

Dell PowerEdge 1955 Company: Dell Price: £2,113 Rating:

\Rack servers development may have gone from strength to strength but even a glance through this group test shows that blade servers have easily kept pace. In fact, in many areas they are now leading the way with some systems delivering incredible specifications with connectivity options that rack servers can't hope to match.

Clearly, the foundation of a good blade server is its chassis as this is expected to provide all cooling, power, redundancy and network services. For cooling, [b]HP's[/b] c-Class leads the way as its brand new chassis supports ten turbine style fan modules. Having seen all of them in action we can safely say that HP's aims in reducing noise levels have been achieved although we wouldn't recommend standing behind the chassis when they switch to turbo mode as the air flow reaches hurricane proportions. IBM's BladeCenter uses a pair of extremely large blower fans which can shift a huge amount of air but are considerably noisier, In fact, IBM offers an optional acoustic attenuation module to help reduce noise levels. Both Dell and Fujitsu Siemens use a pair of large radial fan modules which are clearly efficient but the servers also rely on the power supplies and their own fans to aid in cooling. HP also steps to the front in the power stakes as its sextuplet of hot-swap supplies offers the highest levels of redundancy.

For server blade options IBM is the clear winner as it offers processing choices from four different vendors. Existing BladeCenter customers will also approve of the fact that the new chassis supports older generations of IBM's blades allowing them to maximise their investment. Fujitsu Siemens has the best AMD Opteron support and its unique design allows large multi-processor blades to be created with ease. HP's main focus is on Intel's dual-core Xeons but a full range of Opteron choices are being released whilst Dell brings up the rear with its Intel only options.

Dell offers the least impressive management package and we felt that its OpenManage software suite is more geared up to deal with individual rack and pedestal servers rather than blade servers. Fujitsu Siemens ServerView does provide a far better range of functions but neither the PowerEdge 1955 or BX600 S2 have any sophisticated power management capabilities. For the best you have to go to IBM and HP as their respective Director and Insight Control Center Edition suites are packed with features and both offer quality chassis and server blade power management tools.

In the end there has to be winner and we had to make a tough call as both IBM's BladeCenter H and HP's Blade System c-Class offer an incredible range of features and options. After much debate we gave HP the IT Pro Editor's Choice award as we were impressed with its superior build quality and design. It has paid particularly close attention to power, cooling and redundancy and although it doesn't have the same number of server blades as IBM, both Intel and AMD processors are supported.

HP's management software is also the most sophisticated of all as it has benefited from a steady development and it pays close attention to power controls plus handling and resolving support issues.

IT pro rating on IBM bladecenter came in second place, based on power managment. Real world issues with design and flexibility in long term usage make the IBM blase the real world winner.

IBM BladeCentre H

On test:

[b]IBM BladeCentre H[/b]

[b]Fujitsu Siemens PRIMERGY BX600 S2[/b]

[b]HP Blade System c-Class[/b]

[b]Dell PowerEdge 1955[/b]

IT Pro Rating:
Price: £3,568 exc VAT and up
Company: IBM
Review Date: Oct 06
Pros:
Cons:
Verdict: A superbly built and well specified blade server with plenty of expansion options plus a massive choice of blade processors and connectivity options. Its Director software could do with a refresh but it does deliver good access to the blades along with quality power management tools

IBM has always had a very strong presence in the blade server market since its onset and now offers the largest choice of chassis with three different models available. The BladeCenter H on review is the very latest to join the family and is aimed at a wide variety of functions including running mission critical applications.

Slightly smaller than HP's c-Class, the BladeCenter H chassis comes in at 9U high and has fourteen full height blade expansion slots. A key feature of this chassis is internal design as the chassis uses a mid-plane which is physically split in two with regard to both power and networks connections. The server blades have two, separate connectors which mate with both halves of the mid-plane and this arrangement allows the chassis to provide power and network redundancy to each individual blade.

When two switch modules are installed, the Gigabit Ethernet ports on each blade are routed to each one. One feature that makes IBM's blade server offerings stand out as unique is they are all designed to be backward compatible with all previous chassis. This allows blades from older systems to be used in newer chassis but, more importantly, also allows older blades to be replaced with newer high performance modules.

At the rear, the centre of the chassis is taken up by two enormous blower fans. With a totally populated chassis the maximum power draw on the chassis is in the region of 3.6KW so cooling needs to be good. If one blower module fails the other goes into a turbo mode to ensure cooling isn't reduced and is capable of shifting some serious volumes of air. IBM advised us that the cooling system on the BladeCenter H is actually over specified to the point where it can handle a total power draw of 8KVa.

Expansion slots are arranged on each side of the fan bays. The outer slots accept a wide variety of networking modules and the upper and lower ones mate with different parts of the mid-plane. The chassis accepts up to two management modules which provide a local monitor and two USB ports for connecting a keyboard and screen.

This arrangement provides local KVM facilities but the Fast Ethernet port on each module also delivers KVM over IP so the chassis and blades can be remotely managed simply by pointing a web browser at the management module's IP address. There are plenty of network connection options with Gigabit Ethernet modules developed by Cisco and Nortel, a choice of Brocade, McDATA or QLogic 2Gbps and 4Gbps FC SAN blades and copper pass-through blades. Two bays at the top and bottom of chassis accept a new module which has been co-developed between IBM and Cisco. These are unique to the H chassis and provide high-speed Infiniband connections and 10GbE to those blades that have the appropriate mezzanine card installed.

The management modules provide direct browser access to the chassis with the home page offering a general overview of the chassis and installed blades. It's not as sophisticated as HP's c-Class chassis interface but it provides equally good levels of information and access. You can keep an eye on event logs and environmental values while a fuel gauge tells you all about power consumption, the total available and whatever is left in reserve. It provides full access to each blade and allows you to remotely control them, cycle power and update firmware.

Configuration options are as good and we liked the feature that allows blade boot sequences to be changed on the fly without requiring a reboot. The switch modules all have their own web management interface and controls can be implemented to ensure that only specific users can access them.

Director is the foundation of IBM's server management portfolio and is the standard tool for managing IBM servers, workstations, laptops and, of course, its blade servers. Even without agents installed, Director will pick up the blade server chassis and discover all the installed components including switch modules. However, the agent provides benefits such as enhanced inventory details plus support for remote software distribution and firmware upgrades. A range of tasks including inventory, blade management and hardware status are displayed in the right hand panel and can be activated by dragging and dropping them onto the relevant system displayed in the centre pane.

Operating system distribution is handled by the Remote Deployment Manager (RDM) package which is IBM's standard tool for all its servers, desktops and laptops. However, it does also resell Altiris' deployment software as an option. RDM is a plug in to Director and provides all the OS deployment facilities. Systems can be booted using PXE and RDM uses profiles to store global settings for each OS. It can use either Symantec .PQI disk image files or its own CloneIt files to install an OS on target systems. [b]Linux[/b], Windows and VMware ESX deployments are all supported and you can schedule deployments of your chosen OS to multiple blades.

IBM's Power Executive plug-in is available as a free download and provides real time power monitoring of entire BladeCenter chassis and individual blades and each pair of power supplies can be placed within separate power domains. The current version only supports real time monitoring but new firmware upgrades in the future will provide power capping which allows CPU clock speeds to be modified to reduce power consumption.

As a governing member of Blade.org, IBM has embraced an open design which allows different manufacturers to create modules and switches for the BladeCenter. Its server blade offerings are equally impressive as it has versions that support Intel's Xeon DP, Series 5000, 5100 and Xeon LV processors. Blades are available with AMD single and dual-core Opterons and IBM uniquely supports PowerPC as well. It even offers cell processor blades from Mercury Computer Systems which are designed for applications such as data mining.

The blades themselves are very well built and the LS21 dual socket models can be upgraded to four processor sockets by removing lid and fitting a second blade on top. All have IBM's light path diagnostics onboard and a capacitor allows the blade to be removed with the lights still activated so you can see what the fault is. Optional blade storage expansion modules are also available which offer up to three hot-swap 2.5in. SAS drives allowing RAID-5 to be extended to each blade at the cost of an extra blade slot.

A key feature of the BladeCenter H that makes it stand out is choice as IBM offers four vendors for processors, two different deployment tools, Cisco, Nortel and IBM Ethernet switches plus three SAN switch vendors. Build quality and expansion are exemplary and although its Director management software is starting to look long in the tooth it does provide some sophisticated power controls. The company is also currently promoting its backward compatibility capabilities with some tempting incentives.