Blades Of Glory

Super Micro OfficeBlade
Super Micro provided us with a blade chassis and four two-way Intel Xeon L5420 processors, each at 2.5GHz and 8 Gbytes of memory. The system was built with four power supplies. It is a nifty, 7U-chassis design and the system itself is easy to take apart, put together, install and deploy. The servers scored an average of 6,530 using Geekbench's 32-bit testing, and 2,486.5 using Passmark's 64-bit performance testing. With all four blades operating, the system consumed 406 watts—nicely energy-efficient. It was quiet, too, producing 65 decibels of noise in the front and 69 decibels at the back. It was only slightly above the ambient noise in our lab, and it was much less quiet than our editors when we miss deadline.

The system also did well in thermal testing, producing 74 degrees Fahrenheit at the front and 77 degrees at the fan exhaust.

The browser-based management console is very intuitive. The menu, located down the left margin of the screen, contains seven tabs that cover everything necessary to manage the hardware, user access and virtual media, as well as configure all settings remotely. There is also a Maintenance tab where device info and event logs can be viewed. Configuring the unit via the console also is simple, with labels for each section and field. Every blade, switch and power supply is accessible with detailed information on individual power usage, temperature, fan speed, etc., and all hardware can be turned on, turned off or reset remotely.

Using the console's Java-based KVM is a breeze. After (or before) launching the KVM window by clicking on a link in the console, click the blade you want to control and select KVM. A blue LED on the front of the actual blade illuminates to show users in the data center which one is being remotely accessed.

Another easy-to-use feature is the ability to create virtual drives or redirect local drives for the blade to access. Using this function via the KVM, we were able to redirect the optical drive of our local PC to install the operating system on the blade, then we redirected our local hard drive and copied necessary testing files and programs over.

Of importance to solution providers is this: Super Micro allows for much customization to take place within a system and, by and large, solution providers can determine a great percentage of end-user pricing. Not only is this offering easy to install and control, but delivery, services and billing are just as easy.

Super Micro said the configured system is priced at $13,000 with four blades installed.

Next: The IBM BladeCenter S-Series