Top Competitive Selling Points for BladeCenter E and H
(As of April 2, 2013)

Designed to deliver investment protection and cost savings:

• IBM designed the BladeCenter chassis to be current for many more years than the competition.
• Existing customers can reuse switch and network modules from an older BladeCenter chassis in BladeCenter H, saving over $30,000 in costs when transitioning.
• With few exceptions, all four BladeCenter chassis (BladeCenter E, BladeCenter H, BladeCenter HT, and BladeCenter S) can support:
• All blades that IBM has announced, including blades with Xeon, Opteron, and POWER processors. Plans are in place to support future processors as they become available.
• Many of the same Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and other switch modules IBM has offered since 2002.
• Shared resources and IBM’s innovative power and cooling design, which can result in exceptional operating costs savings of up to 11-20% compared to competitive blade servers, and in the 32-58% range compared to 1U servers (Source: IBM lab testing).
• BladeCenter has the ability to reduce operating costs related to floor space in the data center with up to 84 two-socket servers or up to 42 four-socket servers per rack using BladeCenter E.

Infrastructure Simplification

• Support for up to 14 two-socket or 7 four-socket blades per chassis
• Support for a variety of integrated switches to help reduce cable clutter, costs, and complexity
• Support for role-based security, allowing those customers with separate server, networking, or storage departments to divide management securely
• The ability to manage remotely or work locally using integrated media in the chassis
• Light-Path Diagnostics to help quickly identify potential issues before they can bring down the server

Exceptional Flexibility and Choice

• Support for up to four high-speed switches and four standard-form-factor switches
• Multiple blade offerings using Xeon and POWER processors
• A wide choice of operating systems, including Windows, multiple Linux distributions, AIX, IBM i, and Solaris
• Over ten switch offerings, including Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, Converged, and more
• The largest portfolio of I/O adapters compared to the competition
• A modular blade design that allows for additional I/O or storage per blade

Designed for Extremely High Availability

• Each blade is designed with two redundant connections (power, I/O, and management) to the midplane for those customers who need it.
• The midplane has dual paths, providing an added level of high availability.
• The management modules are hot-swap and offer optional redundancy.
• All blowers and power supplies are hot-swap and redundant.
• Predictive Failure Analysis on critical components on the blades and in the chassis helps to identify problems before they become serious issues.

Performance

• Support for 10 Gb Ethernet end-to-end
• Support for POWER7 and Westmere-EX blades
• Support for up to twelve I/O ports per blade

ServerProven Compatibility for the BladeCenter E (8677):

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/serverproven/compat/us/blade/8677.html

ServerProven Compatibility for the BladeCenter H (8852, 7989):

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/serverproven/compat/us/blade/8852.html