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We participated in the IBM Technology Center in Rome at the IBM Demo Day

An update on the topics of: consolidation, optimization and simplification of the IT infrastructure, news related to technological platforms such as BladeCenter, System x superscale servers – based on the “Enterprise X-Architecture®” architecture – and Storage Systems, to support infrastructure solutions

The initiative is aimed at customer personnel with technical skills.
Sessions are curated by IBM System x and System Storage specialists.

Emiliano Politano (IT Specialist)

Sergio Fini (Storage Technical Support)

Let’s go into detail about the topics covered:

• IBM BladeCenter – concepts, technologies, implementation, new announcements
• IBM System Management – BladeCenter remote management, “live demo”
• IBM System x “high end”, ideal platform for virtualization
• IBM System Storage – presentation and “live demo”

IBM Blade Center

In particular, we can highlight some substantial and interesting differences between IBM Blade devices and other HP, Dell, etc. The complete specular redundancy of all connectivity (network, power) between the upper part to the lower part of each “Lama”, even the Management Module (AMM) can be mirrored redundant.
Another feature, which however saw us protesters is that of the chassy (Enclosure Blade) always unchanged, capable of housing old generation blades and new and brand new generation blades.
This solution is certainly advantageous if we refer to customers who do not want or cannot change blades every 1-2 years, but on the other hand what we dispute is the rapid change in network performance and therefore in the capacity of the constantly changing intra-enclosure communication BUSs (1Gb, 10Gb, InfiniBand, etc).
Most of the new Blades mount two “solid state disks” in mirror internally as it was not possible, for space reasons, to mount hot-plugs.
The possibility of mounting expansion cards for Fiber, iSCSI or InfiniBand connections to the Blade System is very simple and versatile.

IBM System x

Very interesting is the possibility, thanks to the exaquattro (ex4) chipsets and the key scaleXpander, to connect the machines to each other by physically connecting the BUSs and expanding the system as if it were unique.
Interesting virtuosities, as well as the possibility of removing the RAM hot as they are mounted in mirrors, but given the trends of virtual systems, opensource software etc which is to simplify, such complex and expensive technologies in our opinion leave the time they find.

IBM System Management

We talked about IBM System Director which is able to manage physical and virtual machines up to a maximum of 5000, in the current version 5 it mounts agents on the machines and in the virtual case both on the Virtual Center and on the ESXs, monitors energy consumption and is able, in the GreenDataCenter perspective, to limit consumption by defining performance thresholds.
In version 6 that will be released in September it will be completely webBased

IBM System Storage

The following topics were discussed:

Infrastucture Simplification
Business Continuity
Information Lifecycle Management

A quick but interesting overview of the storage products (DS3000 and DS4000 series) and features (Flashcopy, volumecopy, remote mirroring).

The “IBM SAN Volume Controller” and a use case for solving mixed storage complexity were then analyzed.