bendsley

I am a network administrator for large chemical company. Quite frankly, if you read the Tilted Computers forum quite a bit, there is a great chance you have used our products. Anyway, we currently have a 42U rack and at the moment it has one 7U, one 6U, one 5U, two 2U, four 1U, a 1U IP KVM switch, a 1U LCD and a 2U Powervault. I'm also about to put another 5U in there to get it off of the floor (poweredge tower).

We have been considering buying Blade Servers either from IBM or HP. I am wanting to know whether or not anyone has had some experience with these from either company.

So far I have looked at mainly IBM due to the significant R&D that I only can imagine goes into making these machines. The chassis we're mainly looking for is a 7U chassis that will be able to handle up to 14 blades with fibre channel to a NAS.

I'm not looking for IBM vs. HP flame wars, and I don't really care for people to comment that have no idea what they're talking about (i.e. do not know what a blade server or fibre channel is, etc.) Thanks!

__________________
"You hear the one about the fella who died, went to the pearly gates? St. Peter let him in. Sees a guy in a suit making a closing argument. Says, "Who's that?" St. Peter says, "Oh, that's God. Thinks he's Denny Crane."

Fearless_Hyena

I have some experience with HP/Compaq blade servers, but no daily operational use. At my old company I was partly responsible for evaluating the HP/Compaq blade servers (this was just after their transition) for our datacenter and I can't remember any details other than the fact that we stopped considering the blade servers almost right away (after a few months) because of hardware, quality/reliability and usability issues.

I sure hope they have evolved (blade servers in general. really) since then, which was a year or two ago. Instead of the blade server route, we decided to go with a few hundred more 1U servers along the lines of the ProLiant DL360's. We did have the space and prior experience though, so we were comfortable with that.

Try to find someone with experience dealing with IBM and maybe even Dell blade servers, I'd consider them first. I have never touched one but from the news and reviews, the IBM Blade Center looks pretty bad ass! And like you mentioned, I have loads of respect for IBM's R&D and engineering, never had many bad things to say about any IBM product except that they tend to be more expensive. The HPs (which are basically the old Compaq line) seemed to be engineered very well, but they did have some quality issues.

I've just read back and realized that I'm rambling here so take this for what it's worth!



EDITed for typos

Mephisto2

My company is looking at deploying IBM blade-servers. That's several hundred million dollars over a few years.

Make of that as you will.


Mr Mephisto

bendsley

Dell won't have anything out until the end of this coming November. I called a rep today and was told I would have to sign and NDA for them to release information to me about the upcoming blades. However, he did say that even though Dell would be deploying these new products, there would be no heavy focus on them. His stance seemed to say that "we'll sell them to you if you want them, but no biggy."

Dell won't be putting these products out until November when the standards are normalized. IBM released their open standards not too long ago, and I'm sure that we'll be seeing more companies starting to come out and release blade servers.

__________________
"You hear the one about the fella who died, went to the pearly gates? St. Peter let him in. Sees a guy in a suit making a closing argument. Says, "Who's that?" St. Peter says, "Oh, that's God. Thinks he's Denny Crane."

Mephisto2

NDA for Dell servers?

Stick with IBM.


Mr Mephisto

Fearless_Hyena

I was just about to say that but I got beaten by my friend Mr Mephisto

Also I could swear that we have a Poweredge blade server in our (small) lab, I will check in the morning and find out who owns it if it's indeed a Dell blade server.

Some thoughts -- Additionally I might suggest considering any potential alternative to the blade servers that may fit your application? Blade servers are the new hype but I kind of see them as a one-trick pony, GREAT for certain applications but not a catch-all solution. I don't think that blade servers have matured enough yet, but someone (maybe IBM) sometime soon will come out with a server that's the de facto bladeserver workhorse...but it's not been done yet!
Maybe find some of the non-blade-server manufacturers and talk to them about alternatives that might fit best in your environment?

bendsley

The only "blade" powered unit from Dell, and is still currently on their website has pentium III's in it. Not near enough powerful for what I need.

__________________
"You hear the one about the fella who died, went to the pearly gates? St. Peter let him in. Sees a guy in a suit making a closing argument. Says, "Who's that?" St. Peter says, "Oh, that's God. Thinks he's Denny Crane."

Mephisto2

Well, as far as I understand it, blade servers two major several benefits.

Space requirements
Economies of scale


So, unless space is really at a premium and/or you don't want to install a massive server farm, then why not simply stick with the regular 1U server appliances you already have?

Of course, I'm a wireless guy, not a hosting guy, so I'm only giving my opinion, not professional advice.


Mr Mephisto

bendsley

We currently only have the one 42U rack that will hold another 7U. What I did is priced another 42U Dell rack, one Dell IP KVM switch because our other will be full at 16 servers, and 14 1U servers from Dell since the blade chassis will hold 14 servers.

The overall price difference was just over $16,000. It is just cheaper to buy the Blade Center.

__________________
"You hear the one about the fella who died, went to the pearly gates? St. Peter let him in. Sees a guy in a suit making a closing argument. Says, "Who's that?" St. Peter says, "Oh, that's God. Thinks he's Denny Crane."