Blades
(Last updated: 15-02- 2008)
Queries the following Comparison is trying to Answer:
IBM Blades (
HS21 & LS21 & LS41 & HS21xm ) VS HP Blades
( BL460c & BL465c & BL480c BL680c& BL685c )
IBM Blades H Chassis VS HP
C-Class Blades Chassis
How does HP Blades compare
to IBM Blades?
Advantages & Disadvantages
of HP & IBM Chassis & Blades
What is better HP Blades or
IBM Blades? How?
Independent Unbiased
Comparison IBM Blades & HP Blades
HP Blades VS IBM Blades
Introduction:
If you have reached this page you are more probably
already decided on using Blades, but still can't solve the puzzle of IBM
versus HP blades as they are the two main blades vendors and highly competing
to win their share of the blades market. If so you are at the right place
below are a fair comparison of IBM & HP blades. If you are looking for a
biased comparisons then please check the following links.
IBM
Blades
VS HP Blades
BladeCenter S, BladeCenter E, BladeCenter H, BladeCenter T, BladeCenter
HT, Common set of blades, switches, I/O fabrics and management
infrastructure
BladeSystem c-Class, BladeSystem p-Class, bh 5700 ATCA
Intel® Xeon®, AMD Opteron, IBM POWER™, Cell BE™
Intel
Xeon, AMD Opteron, Intel Itanium®
Blades/Chassis
Redundant
Blades/Chassis
Fully Redundant
Blades/Chassis
Blades w/ hotswap
HDD per chassis
Fully Redundant
Blades w/ hotswap HDD
14
14
14
7
7
16
8
0
16
0 - Dual I/O connections to each blade - Dual paths through the backplane to I/O, power and KVM
- Single I/O connections on BL460c and BL465c blades - Single I/O paths for mezzanine slots 2 and 3 on the BL480c and BL685c
Solid
State Drives (SSD)
Available
Not Available
It seems a decision of more blades with hotswap HDD
per chassis versus a real redundancy is the greatest comparing factors
between HP and IBM blades. HP can fit more blades with hotswap HDD where
only IBM can offer a fully redundant blade and Chassis.
Light
Path Diagnostics uses battery to help diagnose even without power to the
blade.
HP offer diagnostics LEDs beside some components, but will not led without
power.
First
Failure Data Capture
Nothing Equivalent
Two
ports/card, managed
Two
ports/card unmanaged
Open
Fabric Manager, Uses standard switches, single login across 100 chassis
Virtual Connect, Uses proprietary switches, single login across four
chassis
HP does not offer a
hardware MM, but provide a management software that will require you to
install it on a blade or two if redundancy required. It can be installed
as well on independent servers. Its disadvantage for HP as it will use up
blades slots and require the customers to do installation.
PowerExecutive™
Power
Regulator, a bit Less functionality and over $400 charge
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HP VS IBM Blades
Chassis flexibility
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM has several chassis sizes with different specs
and sizes to meet the special requirement of every organization and
options which can be interoperated between different chassis, where HP is
only offer the c-class chassis and their older p-class chassis without any
interopobility between them at all.
Blade server flexibility
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM are offering more blades platforms than HP
specially with them including Power and Cell BE blades while HP are not
offering any equivalent to these platforms, which can be a great advantage to
customers who care to run operating system and applications which best
supported on these platforms (Ex: AIX and Linux for power).
ITComparison Team Comments
It seems HP has succeeded to fit more blades per
single chassis 16 blade vs 14 for IBM. As well HP can fit 16 blades with
hotswap HDD where IBM can only fit 7 of them as IBM Blade requires an
expansion unit to fit hotswap HDD, but when it come to redundancy IBM has
a long wining of the race. IBM chassis can fit 14 redundant blades where
HP only can fit 8 semi-redundant blades in their chassis. We called HP
semi-redundant blades as they are not fully redundant as explained under
the redundancy comparison.
Redundancy
- Dual power connections to each blade
- Single power connections to each blade
ITComparison Team Comments
It seems IBM is a clear winner on blades redundancy
at the moment. This can be a major decision factor for large enterprises,
as it can be a major availability factor.
Hot Swap
HDD
Require Expansion unit
which waste 1U and reduce the number of blades per chassis
No need for expansion
unit which save space
ITComparison Team Comments
It seems HP are having an advantage in being able to
fit larger number of blades which includes HotSwap HDD into their C-class
chassis, but IBM has a valid argument as most blades customers depend on
boot from SAN which provide them with stateless blades and all kind of
advantages including the ability of taking snap shots of their blades. In
addition, with IBM introducing Solid State Drives it has even reduced the
need for hotswap harddisks even further as these have no spinner and their
reliability are way better than SCSI HDD. It seems HP still not offering
Solid State Driver at the moment, but might be in the future.
Illuminated path to blade components
ITComparison Team Comments
Better and faster serviceability in the IBM Blades
with the ability to pinpoint the problem even if the blades is not
powering up, which is not offered by HP.
Event identification
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM Blades got a better non over-lapping error
reporting through their Management Module which help in resolving cascaded
problems faster.
Integrated 4X InfiniBand® switch modules
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM offer easier deployment and management of their
InfiniBand switches as they are managed through the management modules
where the ones offered by HP are unmanaged.
Blade deployment and redeployment
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM Open
Fabric Manager
Feature
HP Virtual Connect
All
Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches—Cisco, Nortel, Brocade, QLogic
Switch support
Single proprietary HP
Ethernet switch, Single proprietary HP Fibre Channel switch
Automated and integrated with resource pooling
Failover support
Requires manual
intervention
Virtually all BladeCenter chassis, blades
Compatibility
Single c-Class chassis
support
Single
login via Advanced Management Module across 100 chassis
Interface and capacity
Separate login to
Virtual Connect Manager across four chassis
Built-in
Management Module
Yes
No
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM offer a hardware management module which fit in
a special management slots of the IBM Chassis. It does not use up any
Blades slots and does not require any software installation.
Efficient utilization of available power
resources
ITComparison Team Comments
HP and IBM power management software are offering
almost the same functionality with IBM leading with few enhancements. In
addition, IBM is providing their PowerExecutive as freebie where HP
is charging for it. As far power consumption go it seems both vendor are
doing almost as good and the difference in consumption depend on the
configuration ordered by the customer. Most of our testing resulted with
power difference less than 5% of the two with IBM consuming a bit less in
most scenarios.
Investment Protection
Across Chassis
compatibility
Each chassis is a fully different game
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM has been successful in making their chassis
totally backward compatible with their older modules and blades and most
of their newer modules and blades fit in their older chassis with
performance restrictions in rare cases, but that offer a great investment
protection to customers who is upgrading their chassis comparing to HP
which forcing their customers to toss their old blades and modules out as
none of it is compatible across chassis. Who knows if the next HP chassis
will follow up the same path as their current one, which mean a total lost
of investment when upgrading.
