IBM BladeCenter
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The IBM BladeCenter is IBM's blade server architecture.
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[edit] History
Originally introduced in 2002, the IBM BladeCenter was a relative late comer to the blade market. It is one of the the leading blade architecture solutions in the IT market, with a focus on backward-compatability and collaboration with major IT players including blade.org. The BladeCenter is OEMd by Intel as the company's Enterprise Blade Server line.
[edit] Features
The IBM BladeCenter is currently based on three different types of blade chassis; the original BladeCenter, BladeCenter T for telco environments (NEBS Level 3 compliant) and BladeCenter H for high performance environments. There are currently three major lines of blade servers; HS for Intel CPU x86 based blades (HS21 for dual socket, HS40 for quad socket). LS21/41 for AMD Opteron dual/quad socket based blades and JS for IBM's PowerPC 970 RISC based blades.
The JS20 was the first blade server to run one of the three major UNIX operating systems, IBM's own AIX. The follow on product JS21 which employs single or dual core PowerPC 970 processors was the first blade server to offer built in virtualization, offering Dynamic Logical Partitioning (DLPAR) capabilities.
Recently released is the IBM QS20 blade, utilizing the Cell microprocessor.
The IBM BladeCenter was one of the first Blade architectures not just to integrate computing (server) blades, but also I/O modules (InfiniBand, iSCSI, Ethernet and Fibre Channel) from leading switching vendors such as Cisco, Brocade, QLogic, McData and Nortel.
[edit] See also
The MareNostrum supercomputer employs the IBM BladeCenter
