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IBM® BladeCenter® provides a modular approach to streamlining your system to maximize server capability. Take advantage of the IBM Blade Assessment Tool and see if blades or rack servers are right for you.

What is the Blade Assessment?
The Blade Assessment Tool is designed to help you determine whether blade or rack servers can help meet your organization's requirement. The assessment uses your responses to determine whether your organization has a requirment for rack or blade servers. When you have completed the online assessment, a graphic is generated on-screen. A graphic of the result will also be emailed to you if you request it.

Source:  Blade Assessment Tool

ARMONK, NY and SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- October 23, 2008 -- IBM and Intel Corporation today announced they are extending their collaboration in the blade server market to drive adoption of an open industry specification for blade switches. This will enable switch vendors to maximize return on their research and development by developing products to a single design, reaching more customers with just one product.

Last october 2008 the Tolly Group did a functionality certification and cooperative interoperability evaluation on the IBM Corporation Nortel 1/10Gb Uplink Ethernet Switch Module for IBM BladeCenter (report 208337).  Test report highlights:

• Earns 11 Switch Interoperability certifications for Layer 2 and Layer 3 Advanced LAN functions
• Achieves broad Layer 2 and Layer 3 Interoperability with 19 switches from seven vendors
• Interoperates with other devices tested when supporting 10GbE LAN PHY interface, 802.1p/Q VLAN tas, Link Aggregation, Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol, RSTP, VRRP, OSPF, BGP protocols and more
  

Source: BladeNetwork 208337, Tolly Group report, 1/10Gb Uplink Ethernet Switch

We received a VERY extensive and useful consultant report from 'International Technology Group' which proofs that IBM System x, BladeCenter and System Storage have the
best TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) compared to HP and Dell. We urge everyone to read this.

Some of the results for these comparisons may be summarized as follows:
Server costs. Overall three-year costs, including hardware, maintenance, software, personnel and facilities for use of IBM System x and BladeCenter platforms averaged 12.2 and 8.9 percent less than for use of Dell PowerEdge and HP ProLiant and BladeSystem equivalents respectively.
Disk system costs. Overall three-year costs, including the same components as for servers, averaged 21.6 percent less for IBM DS3000 and DS4000 systems than for Dell/EMC AX4 and CX3 systems, and 22.9 percent less than for HP Modular Storage Array (MSA) and Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) systems.
Combined server and disk system costs. Reflecting the differences described above, combined three-year costs for IBM server and disk system platforms averaged 16.4 and 15.3 percent less than for Dell and HP equivalents respectively.

Source:  Business Case for IBM System x, BladeCenter and System Storage (XSW03022USEN.PDF)

A new updated version of the Power Concepts and Solutions PDF file can be found HERE.

Changelog:  BladeCenter S and the new PDU's are added.

If you want to know something about power, (cable) connectors, PDU's, BladeCenter configurations of just want to know how to calculate Volts to Amps or viceversa than this is your guide.  It is created by Chris Gillen (IBM)

More @ ibm.com/technotes

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a powerful new solution to help organizations slash virtual desktop infrastructure storage requirements by up to 80 percent, allowing them to take advantage of new cloud computing models at significantly reduced costs while increasing energy efficiency.

Update Oct 31st: Added link to webcast

After the VMworld 2008 announcements VMware published some videos about key new features coming with VMware Infrastructure 4.0:

• Fault Tolerance
• vNetwork Distributed Switch
• Host profiles

They also offer a glimpse at the new vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter) 4.0 interface. They are definitively worth a look.

Source:   Virtualization.info

The iSCSI standard (RFC 3720) defines transporting of the SCSI protocol over a TCP/IP network that allows block access to target devices. A host connection to the network can be provided by an iSCSI host bus adapter or an iSCSI software initiator that uses the standard network interface card in the host.

iSCSI-capable IBM Blades utilize two iSCSI initiators during the boot process. One iSCSI software initiator is contained in the system firmware or BIOS. The other iSCSI software initiator is provided by the operating system.