Yesterday I received a new toy for my home lab: An IBM BladeCenter E
Two weeks ago I auctioned two IBM JS21 power blades for very little money, because a rack based IBM Power4 oder Power5 server is incredible expensive. Even an outdatet pSeries 615/630 with slow 1 GHz Power4 processor is not affordable. I don’t like to pay several hundreds Euros for a low performance server. That’s why I decided to catch the mentioned JS21 power blades. 😉 Running these blades requires an IBM BladeCenter, of course and a member of my preferred Unix board offered me one with lot’s important accessoirs. Here it is, with two 2000 W power supplys, two Cisco Systems Intelligent Gigabit Ethernet Switch Module and two Brocade Fibre Channel Switch Modules. An IBM HS20 x86 blade is installed, too. Very nice, because the two JS21 blades aren’t yet shipped.
Compared to my HP c-Class BladeSystem the IBM BladeCenter is very outdated. Only four I/O modules – yes, I know, the BladeCenter H offers 8 I/O modules – and the design and packaging of the IBM blade server isn’t that nice and modern like my HP blade servers. But I know the IBM BladeCenter E is a very old system. It exists much longer than the newer HP c-Class BladeSystem and I’m only interessted in running a current release of AIX. 😉 Combined with the nice I/O modules it’s a very good deal.
If you carefully read the (not so short) compatibility matrix and manuals at IBM, your old chassis should even be able run some of the recent HS22 blades.
At least since you have 2000W PSU’s you should look at your management modules – if they are ‚Advanced Management modules‘ or not.
Hi,
I’m running 2000W power supplys and the standard management modules. Should I replace the management modules with the advanced one?
Kind regards
Tschokko
Will you be comparing HP Virtual Connect Ethernet Flex-10 swetihcs vs. IBM BNT Virtual Fabric Ethernet swetihcs anytime soon?Also, you do get SSD drives in the HP BL49x series.Thanks for a very good independant comparison site!-Jarle-
The ‚Bladecetner Interoperability Guide‘ is what you are looking for, it’s quite vast.
One quite recent can be found here: http://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry/portal/docdisplay?lndocid=MIGR-5073016&brandind=5000020
Look at the PSU, IO and Management Module requirements. – Oh and don’t forget to update the firmwars where needed 🙂