Disk Controllers - IBM BladeCenter HS21 Product Manual
Workhorse 2-socket dual and quad-core intel xeon blade server
Hide thumbs
Also See for BladeCenter HS21:
- User manual (80 pages) ,
- Problem determination and service manual (140 pages)
Table of Contents
Advertisement
Workhorse 2-socket dual and quad-core Intel Xeon blade server
Please see the Legal Information section for important notices and information.
Due to the statistically higher failure rates for traditional spinning media, IBM recommends the
use of the solid state drives (SSDs) as an alternative. They store data on flash memory chips,
rather than on magnetic media. Like HDDs, SSDs can be used as boot media and for random
access storage. However, SSDs offer higher thresholds of shock and vibration, and a higher
operating temperature range (between 0 and 70 degrees C). This yields a failure rate only 1/3
that of HDDs (approximately 3,000,000 hours MTBF vs. 1,000,000 hours). In addition, the IBM
15.8GB 2.5" Solid State Drive uses as little as 1W of power per drive vs. as much as 10W for a
2.5-inch HDD. Similarly, the IBM 31.4GB 2.5" Solid State Drive requires only 2W. This
reduces the storage power requirement and heat output by as much as 90%, compared to 2.5-
inch HDDs. If used as a boot device, no special device drivers are required.
For additional in-chassis storage, an optional "sidecar" storage blade is available. The Storage
and I/O Expansion Unit is a 30mm blade that supports up to three 2.5-inch hot-swap SAS
HDDs. It is installed in the slot adjacent to the blade server.
Fully populating both the HS21 blade and the expansion unit provides up to 734GB of local HDD
storage to the blade server. This storage can be configured as a single RAID-1 or RAID-5 array,
or as two separate RAID arrays—one in the expansion unit and the other in the base blade—for
even more flexibility. If you need more storage space, terabyte capacities are possible with
optional external iSCSI and SAN storage solutions.
External Tape Storage
The HS21 supports various external rack-mounted SAN-attached tape drives. Supported tape
technologies include:
• IBM LTO3 4U Tape Library
• IBM System Storage TS3100/TS3200 Tape Library
• IBM System Storage TS3310 Modular Tape Library
Disk Controllers
All HS21 models include an integrated LSI 1064E SAS controller. This controller supports up to
two internal SAS HDDs or two internal solid-state drives and offers hardware RAID-0/1
support.
If an optional Storage and I/O Expansion Unit is used, the integrated ServeRAID-8k-l
controller offers hardware RAID-0/1/1E support and 32MB of fast PC2-4200 DDR2 cache for the
internal drives. A ServeRAID-8k option adds RAID-5 support for up to five direct-attached SAS
drives, along with 256MB of cache memory for higher performance, and battery backup, without
consuming a valuable adapter slot.
The SAS controller provides data transfer speeds of up to 300MB per second
(full-duplex) across the SAS bus, for an aggregate speed of 600MBps, nearly double that of
Ultra320 SCSI's 320MBps (half-duplex) bandwidth. The serial design of the SAS bus allows
maximum performance to be maintained as additional drives are added.
High-Performance Adapter Slots
The HS21 blade server includes one x8 PCIe and one 133MHz PCI-X adapter slot on each
blade. Either one standard BladeCenter form factor or SFF (small form factor) PCI-X expansion
card or one SFF PCIe adapter, or two CFF (compact form factor) cards (one CFFv and one
CFFh) can be installed in this blade. (The CFFh card or the SFF PCIe card uses the high-speed
expansion connector as a second I/O slot.)
One of two possible expansion units may be added to increase the number of expansion card
slots available. Each will utilize the expansion connector in the HS21:
• The 30mm PCI I/O Expansion Unit II provides two PCI-X slots in addition to the one on the HS21
blade (3 PCI-X slots usable).
• The 30mm Storage and I/O Expansion Unit provides two adapter slots: either two PCI-X cards or
one PCI-X and one PCIe slot in addition to the one PCI-X slot on the HS21 blade. (The first PCI-X
card installed in the expansion unit must be a Gigabit Ethernet card, because it is routed to module
bays 1 and 2.) It connects to the blade server via the high-speed expansion connector. (If this
expansion unit is used, a CFFh card can be plugged into the expansion unit's expansion connector,
instead of in the HS21 blade's expansion connector.)
The HS21 also supports an optional feature card (in a dedicated slot) that provides concurrent
KVM (cKVM) and concurrent media (cMedia) access by multiple administrators at once.
Adapters can also be used to add interfaces to BladeCenter communication modules, including
Fibre Channel, Myrinet, additional Gigabit Ethernet modules, InfiniBand, etc.
3
in each direction
7.
- Quick Links:
- Product Overview
- Hs21 Specifications
Hide quick links:
Advertisement
Table of Contents
