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IBM
Blades
VS SUN Blades |
|
Chassis flexibility |
BladeCenter S, BladeCenter E, BladeCenter H, BladeCenter T, BladeCenter
HT, Common set of blades, switches, I/O fabrics and management
infrastructure |
SUN Blade 6000
SUN Blade 8000 |
|
ITComparison Team Comments IBM Blades vs
SUN Blades |
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 Sun is
only offering the SUN Blade 6000 & 8000 chassis at the moment which is not
interoperable. You can't switch blades & modules between the SUN
chassis, as you could with the IBM Chassis. That help IBM Chassis being
more flexible and offer a better investment protection. |
|
Blade server flexibility |
Intel® Xeon®, AMD Opteron, IBM POWER™, Cell BE™ |
Intel
Xeon, AMD Opteron, SPARC |
|
ITComparison Team Comments |
Both IBM & SUN are
offering AMD & Intel Blades. In the Unix side IBM Offer P-Series Blades
& SUN Offer SPARC Blades. In addition, IBM offer a cell processor Blade
QC10 which SUN Still does not offer any equivalent to. |
|
Blades/Chassis
Full Height
Blades/Chassis
Fully Redundant
Blades/Chassis
Blades w/ hotswap
HDD per chassis
Fully Redundant
Blades w/ hotswap HDD |
14
14
14
14
14 |
10
10
0
10
0 |
|
ITComparison Team Comments
SUN Blades vs
IBM Blades |
It seems SUN has
only succeeded in fitting 10 Blades in 10 U chassis which makes it
around 40% lower Density than IBM H-Chassis. Though when it comes to
fitting a hotswap SCSI Drives SUN Can fit 10 Blades.
In addition, when it come to redundancy IBM has
a long wining of the race. IBM chassis can fit 14 fully redundant blades where
SUN only can fit 10 semi-redundant blades in their chassis. We called
SUN semi-redundant blades as they are not fully redundant as explained under
the redundancy comparison.
- SUN Density
is very low for a blade solution as they are not doing any better than
1U server can. Fitting 10 Blades in 10 U enclosure that is 1U per Blade
which could been the same for a rack mounted server.
Please note with
IBM releasing their new blades HS22 few months ago, they have no more to
give up extra slots for adding Hotswap HDDs. |
|
Redundancy |
- Dual power connections to each blade
- Dual paths through the backplane to I/O, power and KVM
|
- Single power connections to each blade
- Single I/O paths for Certain I/O slots
on most of their blades |
|
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
Solid
State Drives (SSD) |
Require Expansion unit
which waste 1U and reduce the number of blades per chassis
Available |
No need for expansion
unit which save space
Not Available |
|
ITComparison Team Comments
SUN Blades vs
IBM Blades |
It seems SUN are having an advantage in being able to
fit larger number of blades which includes HotSwap HDD into their 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 SUN still not offering
Solid State Driver at the moment, but might be in the future. Its quite
easier for SUN to fit HDDs in their Blades as the size factor of them is
the equivalent of a 1U server, which does not make sense why to go
blades, if it is not going to save rack & Floor space!! |
|
Illuminated path to blade components |
Light
Path Diagnostics uses battery to help diagnose even without power to the
blade. |
Sun does not offer any equivalent. |
|
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 at
all by SUN. |
Event identification
|
First
Failure Data Capture |
Nothing Equivalent |
|
ITComparison Team Comments |
IBM Blades got a better non over-lapping error
reporting through their Management Module which help in resolving cascaded
problems faster. |
|
Connectivity |
IBM Offer internal switches in addition to their passthru offering for
all kind of connectivity available in the market today (Ethernet,
Fiber Channel, 10GB Ethernet , and InfiniBand). As well they offer it
from multiple vendors for each connectivity type. |
Sun only offer Pass-thru modules for all connectivity types, no internal
switches at all. |
|
ITComparison Team Comments
SUN Blades vs
IBM Blades |
SUN fail to
integrate any switches into their offering, which make their blades
offering not any better than 1U servers offering. As they are already
packaging 10 blades in 10U Chassis, so no space saving. Further more,
they force you to use further space for external switches. In addition,
you don't get rid of all the nasty network & Fiber cables between the
chassis & the switches.
In the other
hand, IBM Blades packages 14 Blades in 9 U Chassis which save you on
space. Further more they allow you to fit all your required switches in
the chassis saving you further on space & cabling. It even look a lot
smoother when getting rid of the 100's of cables connecting the servers
to the switches in the case of 1Us server & SUN Blades. |
|
Blade deployment and redeployment |
Open
Fabric Manager, Uses standard switches, single login across 100 chassis |
No Equivelant |
|
ITComparison Team Comments
SUN Blades vs
IBM Blades |
IBM Open Fabric
Manager provide automatic failover for failing blade to another blade
using boot from SAN functionality. In addition, it removes all the work
involved in replacing a failing blade.
Sun Does not
offer anything equivalent to IBM Open Fabric Manager & will require the
admin to reconfigure the SAN Zoning & the network VLANs when
replacing any blade wasting precious time & increase the downtime
required to replace a blade. |
|
Built-in
Central
Management Module |
Yes |
N/A |
|
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM Blades vs
SUN Blades |
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. It offers
many monitoring & management features.
SUN Blades does not offer any equivalent to IBM Management Module. They
only offer direct server management, which in turn means you still have
to manage your blades as a normal rack server, not as a blade
infrastructure. |
|
Efficient utilization of available power
resources |
PowerExecutive
Active Energy Manager |
N/A |
|
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM Blades vs
SUN Blades |
IBM power management software are
able to monitor the power per blade, per chassis, & per module. IBM Active
Energy manager can integrate with third party monitoring tools to
integrate with your already existing management
IBM Active
Energy Manager can cap power usage based on trend data & without risking
the operation of the blades
IBM Active
Energy Manager can monitor IBM Blades, System X, IBM Storage,
P-Series, & anything connected to IBM Intelligent PDUs.
SUN did not seems
to offer any equivalent at the time of our test. Neither the SUN partner
nor our search on the internet were able to find any equivelant power
management tool from SUN. This will be update if any appears in the
future. |
|
Unpacking Offering |
Assembeled at customer site (Default)
Fully Installed (Charge apply)
Fully Installed + third party apps
installed (Charge Apply) |
Assembeled at customer site (Default)
Fully Installed (Charge apply)
N/A |
|
ITComparison Team Comments |
Both IBM & SUN Ship
their blades systems to be assembeled on the customer site. |
|
Investment Protection |
Across Chassis
compatibility |
Each Chassis is a fully different game. |
|
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM Blades vs
SUN Blades |
IBM has been successful in making their chassis
totally backward compatible with their current & older modules and blades
and most of their newer modules and blades fit in all of their chassis
with performance restrictions in rare cases, but that offer a great
investment protection to customers who is upgrading their chassis
comparing to SUN 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 SUN chassis
will follow up the same path as their current one, which mean a total lost
of investment when upgrading. |