Learn about Flex System, offering superior manageability, faster communications, more storage capacity, better storage management, and broader/better physical/virtual system management than all of today’s leading blade competitors. For more inofrmation on Pure Systems, visit http://ibm.co/J7Zb1v.
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A Comparison of IBM’s New Flex System Environment to Traditional Blade Architectures
1. Research Report
A Comparison of IBM’s New Flex System Environment to
Traditional Blade Architectures
Executive Summary
In this Research Report, Clabby Analytics takes a closer look at IBM’s Flex System converged
architecture. We compare the new Flex System advanced blade offering to its closest rival:
traditional blade architecture. And what we find is that Flex System offers superior manageability,
faster communications, more storage capacity (using up to eight internal solid state drives [SSDs]
per compute node) and better storage management — as well as broader/better physical/virtual
system management — than all of today’s leading blade competitors.
Introduction
For over a decade Clabby Analytics has been a big fan of blade architecture. We like blade designs
(the ability of blades to share a chassis and common components such as power supplies and fans
— reducing energy and real estate requirements). We like blade flexibility (the ability to run
multiple operating environments such as Windows, Linux, and Unix); and the ability to run
different processors (for instance, x86, POWER, and field programmable gate arrays). We like
blade extensions in reliability/availability/serviceability (RAS). And we like the way that some
blades handle virtual I/O (this simplifies the assignment of network addresses). However, today’s
blade architectures have some hardware and software limitations as compared with new “converged
systems” designs:
Siloed system management — most blade environments offer monitor/management tools
focused on managing the physical blade environment. But, when it comes to managing
virtual (logical) machines as well as network/storage subsystems, many blade vendors rely
on 3rd
party management/infrastructure products. To manage blade environments most
efficiently, systems administrators and managers need well-integrated tools that can
manage both physical and virtual resources across the entire systems environment
(compute nodes, storage, and networks) in a cohesive, integrated manner.
Greater Latency— Cisco blades and Hewlett-Packard blades that use Cisco’s FEX
architecture flow traffic north (up) to a Layer 3 network Top of Rack (TOR) switch (that
provides security, intrusion detection, and other services), then south (down or out) to
communicate with other compute nodes or storage devices. This slows the system down.
A more efficient approach is to offer a networking architecture with the ability to route
traffic between nodes (in an east-west) as needed.
Chassis design — most of today’s blade chassis rely on a hardwired mesh of copper
connectors that will make it difficult (if not impossible) to support speeds beyond 40 Gb
without a chassis/midplane redesign. So, a major redesign of the market’s leading blade
architectures will need to take place to handle higher communications speeds (which
means that some blade environments may not yield the expected return-on-investment
[ROI] because the blade chassis may need replacing sooner than planned). Additionally,
today’s converged systems chassis have advantages in airflow, power consumption, and
cooling — plus room to support advanced communications adapters such as fourteen data
rate (FDR) InfiniBand (some competing blades cannot support this technology).