IBM Adds 1 TB Disk to the BladeCenter S Chassis

Published: December 8, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sometimes, like when you are supporting online transaction processing, you need lots of little, fast disk drives with lots of arms chasing random bits of data spread across those drives. Sometimes, when you are storing big wonking media files, you want a single, fat disk, and the rotational speed is not nearly as important as the raw, cheap capacity. The latter reason is why IBM has put a new 1 TB drive in its BladeCenter S blade server chassis for small businesses.

The disk, which goes by the product number 42D0547, isn't fast, spinning at 7.2K RPM as it does (less than half the rotational speed of the 15K RPM disks that are the standard in OLTP machines). It is a 3.5-inch disk drive with a slimline (meaning half-height) form factor; it sports a SAS interface and has an average latency of 4.16 milliseconds and an average read seek time of 7.4 milliseconds. The disk has a burst data transfer rate of 116 MB/sec on the SAS interface.

At the moment, IBM is supporting Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5, and Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 certified for it, as well as VMware's ESX Server 3.5.2 hypervisor, on the new disk. No word about i 6.1 or AIX 6.1, but it seems likely as an option soon. IBM did not announce pricing for the disk, but if you poke around on the IBM Web store, you can find the unit here. The 1 TB disk for the BladeCenter S chassis will be available on February 27, and will cost $769.

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