IBM eServer BladeCenter review

It has taken us more than nine months to pull this off, but we've finally coaxed IBM into submitting its much-vaunted eServer BladeCenter for review. Initially launched in September last year, this was the first Xeon-based blade server to hit the market and yet bizarrely IBM would only commit to providing a single review unit for the entire European market. The result was that its delivery was constantly promised, only for it to be snatched from our grasp at the last second. We had virtually given up all hope of ever seeing this product in Enterprise. But here it is at last, so read on to find out whether the wait was worthwhile.

The most striking feature of the BladeCenter is its size. This is easily the largest blade server we've yet seen, with the chassis stretching to 7U high. However, as with the ProLiant BL p-Class (see p178), there's a premium to pay for the Xeon processors. Despite the IBM's size and the fact it can handle up to 14 dual-processor blades, this equates to a maximum processing density of only 68 processors in an industry-standard rack. Even so, it's 56 more than you'll get with the HP alternative. Build quality is excellent and the mighty chassis also offers good fault tolerance with 12 bays at the rear. The two largest are home to enormous variable-speed blower fans - noise levels during the initial power-up sequence are frightening. Two hot-swap power supplies are supplied as standard and can be augmented with two more, while up to four quad-port Layer 2 Gigabit switch modules, or a mixture of Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches, may be fitted. Lastly, a remote-management module complete with local KVM switch is included and a second, redundant management module can be added as well.

The blades are sheathed in a solid steel shell, and the motherboard is accessed by depressing a couple of levers at the side and flipping up the lid. The Xeon processor sockets are located at the front, with one occupied by a 2.4GHz module on the review system and covered with a large passive heatsink. Storage is provided by a single 2.5in 40GB IDE hard disk and there's room for a second drive, although hardware RAID isn't featured. If you want this, you'll need to install IBM's hot-swap Ultra320 SCSI expansion unit, which will require a bay to itself.

Each blade's network connection is handled by a pair of Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet adaptors, which are routed through to different switch modules at the rear. Local access to each blade is achieved by using the KVM ports on the management module. Each blade has a couple of control buttons at the top so you can swap the view from one system to another and also determine which blade gets to use the CD-ROM, floppy and USB ports fitted in the chassis. The blades may be powered off or on from the front panel, but you can access this and more from the management module's browser interface, which provides access to the blade enclosure. You're able to view the status of any component, and selected blades can be remotely controlled or receive a firmware upgrade. Full access is provided to power, so it's possible to switch them off and on or reset them. Each blade's boot device priorities can also be remotely modified and the switch modules configured from here as well.

OS distribution is handled by Remote Deployment Manager (RDM), which is IBM's standard tool for all its servers, desktops and laptops, although it requires a small patch to support the BladeCenter. It's not as clever as HP's Altiris software package, but it does provide a simple interface separated into three panes, where new systems that are attempting a network boot using PXE are displayed to the left. RDM uses profiles to store global settings for each OS and can use either PowerQuest Drive Image files or its own CloneIt image files to install an OS on target systems. IBM's Director looks after general systems management and provides a good range of tools for monitoring critical system components. It requires an agent loaded locally, which provides hardware information on each blade and good alerting tools in case of failure or an event. 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.