An experience with IBM Blade Center

Recently, we placed an order for IBM blades HS21. At the time of quotes, discussions, technical clarifications the line toed by IBM was that the power supply for the chassis is N+N redundant, meaning out of the 2 supplies, if one conked off, the other should comfortably power the blade center in which all slots are populated with fully configured blades .
(Remember, this is an aspect, where IBM & HP fought tooth & nail in public!).

We decided to check this claim. In our case, all the 14 slots were populated with 2 Quadcore Intel procs with 16 Gig RAM and 2 sas disks. When we tried to power on, the chassis refused to power on all blades under "fully redundant" mode. It allowed to power all the blades only in "non-redundant" or "redundant with potential loss of performance". This is apparently because the total power of each supply is 2900 W which is simply not enough to comfortably power all the 14 blades.

The implications for those who want to heavily rely on x86/64+blades+virtualization for their comuting needs may well be guessed. You are warned!

Attn patients consuming cortisones

Currently, for every inflammation or allergic reaction of the body, which lacks clear diagnosis, steroids are prescribed. Typically, cortisones - with trade names wysolone, prednisolone etc.

One of the omissions that happens is that the patient does not know that one of the side effects is muscular atrophy. (Wasting away of muscles). Of all the muscles, the significant effect is on quadriceps. This results in a mistaken impression in the patient that he has knee joint problem. Another is loss of confidence in freely moving about, climbing steps, crossing simple barrier, running etc.

This need not be! Start cycling from the day you start taking cortisones (typically a couple of Kilometers should be OK, but you choose your level) and you will notice that this would counteract the effect of steroid. Even if you have not started on day one, you can start anytime and you will start noticing the benefits!

(I learnt it the hard way!)

Welcome!

This is my first post in this blog. I have lived on this planet for nearly half a century and have made a number of mistakes. I wanted to share many of them, so that others can learn from my mistakes, not repeat them and make their own creative mistakes!

Welcome!

This is my first post of this blog. I have lived nearly half-a century on this planet and have committed a number of mistakes. I thought it would be great to share those, so that others can learn from My mistakes, so that they need not repeat, but creatively make new mistakes!

Today's is not exactly a mistake, but can turn out to be:

We wanted to buy some blade servers and after going through lot of claims and counter claims in various web pages and literature, by a slim advantage of price, we finalized IBM Blade Center.

Even before we commissioned, we decided to check the claim of full redundancy of power. (Please remember: This is the area where bloody battles were fought between HP & IBM!).

The claim of ALL major players is that they would be able to power their blade setup (with fully configured blades, occupying all the slots) with half of their power supplies being shut-off.

In the present case, the chassis was fully occupied, each blade was configured with max processors, but only part capacity of RAM and max hard disks. When we set the power options to "Fully redundant", the blades simply did not power up! Only if we allowed "Redundancy with potential impact on performance" or "No redundancy" options, in the management console, did the blades power on. This means that, in the event of one power supply failing in a zone (This system is divided into 2 zones and each zone is supplied with 2 power supplies) the other supply

For those, who are planning a setup with heavy reliance on x86, Blades & Virtualization, this is a fact which should be given careful consideration!

Disclaimer: This blog is purely my personal opinion and based on my own judgement. You may use the contents freely, but at your own risk. No warranties or guarantees, explicit or implicit. Period!