IBM sharpens BladeCenter offering

IBM has beefed up its popular BladeCenter offering with the introduction of six new models and improved power management features.

The five HS20 and one JS20 models feature increased speed, power management and operating system support.

Billed as the first product in a rapidly evolving roadmap focused on reducing the costs of power in the data center, the new power management software is branded PowerExecutive.

It is designed to help better manage power consumption by evaluating each blade's actual power usage according to its power-demanding components, such as specific processors and hard drives.

With the five new HS20 models, IBM has added I/O expansion flexibility allowing customers to add two hot-swappable SCSI disk drives while doubling the number of Ethernet or fibre channel port connections to eight and four respectively.

This allows the BladeCenter chassis to fit 14 SCSI-based blades. As a result, the new SCSI drives can provide up to 85 per cent more speed and up to 83 per cent more capacity than the prior IDE drives, IBM claimed.

Big Blue also said that customers will benefit from being able to mirror each blade's operating system, simultaneously attaching it to a storage area network.

The models feature 2.8GHz to 3.6GHz Intel Xeon processors with 64-bit extensions, and will be available from 12 November starting at $2,039.

The eServer BladeCenter JS20, with 2.2GHz processors, has been designed to offer clients more performance to handle commercial workloads such as file and print serving, web serving and collaboration, in addition to high performance computing intensive workloads on Unix and Linux.

IBM claims a 37 per cent improvement in processor speed compared to the previous offering, which featured 1.6GHz processors. It is scheduled for release on 29 October priced from $2,699.

A new module of IBM's UpdateXpress software, designed to provide a unified point to update and install all BladeCenter networking switches and modules as well as server components, is also now available.

It can be accessed through the IBM Director BladeCenter systems management software.