The Four Hundred

With yesterday's announcement of its "Xcalibur" BladeCenter blade servers, IBM introduced what could evolve into a new family of products under the eServer umbrella. The eServer line includes xSeries Intel-based servers; pSeries Unix and iSeries OS/400 RISC-based servers; and zSeries mainframes. These machines all have unique architectures; so can the BladeCenters. This is why the BladeCenters are being branded distinctly from the other eServer brands and not just thrown into the xSeries category, even though the initial models use Intel iron.

The BladeCenter is a 7U form-factor chassis that can house up to 14 two-way server blades, yielding a total of 168 processors in a standard 42U rack. This is twice the level of density as a rack of two-way 1U form factor servers that have been shipping for over two years. The difference between rack servers and blade servers, aside from density, is that a blade chassis (like the one that IBM has created with the BladeCenter, as well as designs from other vendors) has an internal Gigabit Ethernet backplane built into the chassis; with rack servers, the network is externalized and there are cables hanging everywhere. Moreover, the BladeCenter design includes Ethernet switches integrated into the base chassis, with future BladeCenter chassis getting Fibre Channel and InfiniBand switches as options. In the BladeCenter, the chassis is a self-contained server network, just like Hewlett-Packard's "Powerbar" bh7800 and "QuickBlade" ProLiant BL blade servers. This represents a further level of integration in the data center, one that customers dealing with server sprawl will likely welcome.

The BladeCenter H20 blade is based on the ServerWorks Grand Champion-LE chipset, and they plug into the BladeCenter chassis in a vertical alignment, side by side. The BladeCenter HS20 can have one or two "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon processors, which are equipped with 512 KB of integrated L2 cache memory. IBM is offering the 2 GHz and 2.2 GHz versions of the Prestonia chips in the HS20 blades, which have four memory slots that today support 256 MB, 512 MB, and 1 GB of PC2100 DDR-SDRAM; when 2 GB PC2100 memory modules become available, IBM will support them and boost the total main memory per HS20 blade to 8 GB. Each blade has space for two integrated ATA-100 IDE disk drives, each with a 40 GB capacity with a relatively slow 5,400 RPM (which means that they are cooler than 10K RPM or 15K RPM disks). An optional SCSI disk expansion card, which eats up the space of one blade, can be attached to a blade to give it another 146.8 GB of capacity, using 73.4 GB Ultra320 disks. The BladeCenter chassis can also support externally attached disk arrays through Gigabit Ethernet links, and will support Fibre Channel connections to external disk arrays early in the first quarter of 2003, according to Tom Bradicich, chief technology officer and director of IBM's xSeries unit.

Bradicich said that IBM will eventually offer support for the "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors that are due next year from Intel, as a follow-on to the "Foster" Xeon MP processors that began shipping this year. The Fosters have a relatively low clock speed compared with the Prestonias, and do not support hyperthreading either, which helps boost performance, so the Fosters are not exactly popular with server makers at this point. IBM will also eventually deliver BladeCenter blades that are based on Intel's Itanium 2 processors--perhaps the current 1 GHz "McKinley" chips or the future 1.2 GHz or 1.3 GHz "Madison" follow-ons to the McKinleys, which are due next year as well. IBM, said Bradicich, will use whatever Itanium 2 chips are current at the time, and this is possible because they are pin-compatible. While IBM earlier this year hinted that it would deliver BladeCenter blades based on its own Power line of 64-bit RISC processors, Bradicich hedged a little bit yesterday on whether or not any Power processors will end up on BladeCenter blades, saying that IBM has not made any final decisions, that it is assessing the possibilities, and that Power-based blades remain on the roadmap.

Offering customers the option of running AIX, Linux, or maybe even OS/400 instances in a blade cluster, makes good sense, since most of IBM's AIX and OS/400 customers use a mix of environments. But fighting the political battles inside of IBM to make that happen is not an easy thing. However, only by supporting AIX, OS/400, and maybe even z/OS mainframe environments, can the BladeCenter machines be said to represent a different kind of server from IBM--and, indeed, the kind of server that its two-year-old eServer rebranding was all about. If these environments are not going to be supported natively in a BladeCenter chassis, then call it an xSeries box and move on.

The BladeCenter chassis has room for 14 blades in the front and four Ethernet switches in the back. It also includes a single CD-ROM drive and floppy disk drive, two redundant 1,200-watt power supplies (expandable to four), and two fans. The BladeCenter chassis costs $2,789. A BladeCenter HS20 blade with a single 2-GHz Prestonia chip and two 256-MB memory DIMMs costs $1,879; a blade with the faster 2.4 GHz Prestonia chip and the same 512 MB of main memory costs $2,279. The 40 GB IDE drive costs $299. And additional 2 GHz processor costs $799 from IBM, while the 2.2 GHz processor costs $1,199. A four-port Gigabit Ethernet switch costs $2,199, while a two-port Fibre Channel switch will cost $24,999 when it starts shipping. When you do the math, a reasonably configured BladeCenter with 28 of the 2 GHz processors, 2 GB of main memory, and 80 GB of disk per blade, four Ethernet switches, and four power supplies costs $75,771. A full rack of BladeCenters, which would pack a lot of power in one place, would cost $454,626.

The BladeCenter chassis and BladeCenter HS20 blades are shipping in limited availability now and will be generally available in November. The Fibre Channel card and switch options will ship sometime in January. The BladeCenter has been certified to run Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server at the SP3 level and has been certified for Red Hat Linux 7.3 and SuSE Linux 8.0 as well. IBM says that it will also have the machine certified to run Novell NetWare.