Blades Of Glory

The IBM BladeCenter S-Series
When the IBM blade solution arrived at our door, it scared us. It was packed inside a wooden crate that looked like a coffin straight out of a Bela Lugosi movie. Our group of reviewers took one look and braced for back pain. Much to our surprise, though, setup (including the lifting) was a breeze. With the servers removed, the elegant, locking black S-Series chassis is little more than 90 pounds and looks more like living room furniture than a serious computing solution.

But a serious computing solution it is. IBM provided its 7U chassis and blade servers with four different configurations: one with an Intel Core2 Duo E6405 at 2.13GHz and 2 Gbytes of RAM; one with dual, Intel Xeon E5450s at 3.0GHz and 4 Gbytes of RAM; one with dual Intel Xeon 5130s at 2.0GHz and 4 Gbytes of RAM; and one with dual Intel Xeon X3363s at 2.83GHz and 4 Gbytes of RAM. Its highest-performing blade, with dual Xeon E5450s, scored a far-out 7,429 on Geekbench and 2,929.4 on Passmark. If the system had been built spec'd out with four of those servers, its performance would have blown the roof off (but it may also have blown the roof off pricing, too).

With all four blades running, the S-Series consumed 705 watts of power. Its thermals ran to 77 degrees at the front of the system, 81 degrees at the exhaust fan. It was a very quiet system, too, throwing 69 decibels of noise with the back door closed and 78 decibels with it open. (We recommend keeping it closed.)

IBM's Advanced Management Module is extremely robust and browser-based. Similar to Super Micro's arrangement, AMM has a treelike configuration with six headings broken down into sections for monitoring and controlling the system remotely. The monitors give a wealth of information about everything from status to version numbers. The other sections cover user and file management and security, as well as allowing for individual control of the blades, switches, PSUs and any other related hardware in the chassis.

The console's layout permits users to access information with only one or two mouse clicks. After being selected from the menu in the left frame, the right frame displays the respective page with the top of the page containing hot links to the relevant section within that page.

Where appropriate, there are easy-to-read color and/or symbol notations that allow administrators to see at a glance the health of the particular system they are looking at.

The remote-control feature took a little time for our testers to get used to and, although it worked flawlessly, it had some slightly annoying shortcomings. Taking control of the remote server is done by simply clicking the mouse button while the cursor is on the remote desktop. To switch back to controlling the local computer, the user presses the Tab or Ctrl key. Reviewers found themselves again and again pressing the Tab key to switch fields only to find themselves dropping control of the server. In addition, to send the Ctrl-Alt-Del command (a necessity for logging onto most Windows operating systems), the user must tab out of the remote window, click an on-screen button and then click back into the remote screen.

At this configuration, IBM priced the system at slightly more than $27,000.

Next: Dell M-Series