|
IBM
Blades |
DELL Blades |
Chassis flexibility |
BladeCenter S, BladeCenter E, BladeCenter H, BladeCenter T, BladeCenter
HT, Common set of blades, switches, I/O fabrics and management
infrastructure |
PowerEdge 1955
PowerEdge M1000e |
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM Blades vs
Dell 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 Dell is
only offering the M1000e chassis at the moment which is not interopable
with their previous chassis PowerEdge 1955. So M1000e is a single option
that Dell offer as chassis and it does not has any compatibility with
earlier chassis. |
Blade server flexibility |
Intel® Xeon®, AMD Opteron, IBM POWER™, Cell BE™ |
Intel
Xeon, AMD Opteron |
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM Blades vs
Dell Blades |
IBM are offering more blades platforms than
Dell
specially with them including Power and Cell BE blades while Dell 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). As usual AMD &
Intel is all dell got to offer. |
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 |
16
8
0
16
0 |
ITComparison Team Comments
Dell Blades vs
IBM Blades |
After IBM has
released their new blade HS22, they have added HotSwap SCSI as a part of
the blade itself. So IBM Blades are no longer requiring an expansion
unit to contain hotswap Harddisk, which kill the main advantage that
Dell & HP were always depending on when competing against IBM. Though
even with IBM now offering internal Hotswap HDD & with them succeeding
to avoid the bad design other vendors followed and put the harddisk over
the CPU, their customers seems to be adopted to the boot of SAN idea,
which IBM has been promoting for a while with their blade & which give
an easy protection against hardware failure & help in building a
Disaster Recovery Solution. Therefore IBM blades does not have to
sacrifice an expansion unit size to add Hotswap HDDs any more, which get
its blade density to be very competitive when compared with Dell. |
Redundancy |
- Dual power connections to each blade
- Dual I/O connections to each blade
- Dual paths through the backplane to I/O, power and KVM
|
- Single power connections to each blade
- Single I/O connections on M600 and
M605 blades
- Single I/O paths for Certain I/O slots
on M805 & M905 |
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
Dell Blades vs
IBM Blades |
It seems Dell are having an advantage in being able to
fit larger number of blades which includes HotSwap HDD into their M1000e 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 Dell still not offering
Solid State Driver at the moment, but might be in the future.
It seems a decision of more blades with hotswap HDD
per chassis versus a real redundancy is the greatest comparing factors
between Dell and IBM blades. Dell can fit more blades with hotswap HDD where
only IBM can offer a fully redundant blade and Chassis. |
Illuminated path to blade components |
Light
Path Diagnostics uses battery to help diagnose even without power to the
blade. |
Dell offer diagnostics LEDs beside some components, but will not led without
power. |
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
Dell. |
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. |
Integrated 4X InfiniBand® switch modules |
Managed
InfiniBand Switches |
Unmanaged
InfiniBand Switches |
ITComparison Team Comments |
IBM offer easier deployment and management of their
InfiniBand switches & more functionality as they are offering managed
Infiniband switches where the ones offered by Dell are unmanaged. |
Blade deployment and redeployment |
Open
Fabric Manager, Uses standard switches, single login across 100 chassis |
No Equivelant |
ITComparison Team Comments
Dell 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.
Dell 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 |
Almost |
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM Blades vs
Dell 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.
Dell user Chassis Management Controller (CMC) which seems to mainly offer
monitoring & log readings, not much of a centralized management. Dell
still more dependant on directly managing a blade by blade connecting
directly to the iDRAC chip placed into each blade. |
Efficient utilization of available power
resources |
PowerExecutive
Active Energy Manager |
Dell
Power Manager |
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM Blades vs
Dell Blades |
IBM power management software are
able to monitor the power per blade, per chassis, & per module.
Dell Power Manager
can monitor power per blade & Chassis, but not per modules.
IBM Active
Energy manager can integrate with third party monitoring tools, where
Dell Power Manager does not seems to be integration ready.
IBM Active
Energy Manager can cap power usage based on trend data & without risking
the operation of the blades, where Dell only offer a hard threshold
which can cause operations problems.
IBM Active
Energy Manager can monitor IBM Blades, System X, IBM Storage,
P-Series, & anything connected to IBM Intelligent PDUs, Where Dell Power
Manager can only manage Dell Blades. |
Unpacking Offering |
Assembeled at customer site (Default)
Fully Installed (Charge apply)
Fully Installed + third party apps
installed (Charge Apply) |
Fully Installed (Default) |
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM Blades vs
Dell Blades |
Dell had made a
great deal of them delivering their blades fully installed & ready to
power on and not having to assemble it at customers site. Although this
definitely can save customers time, it can't be the main selling point
for a blade offering. As both IBM & HP has a similar offering, but they
explicitly charge for it where dell had implicitly accounted for it in
each chassis delivered.
Furthermore, IBM &
HP offer to deliver your blades fully installed with third party apps &
modules integrated, which Dell still not offering. |
Investment Protection |
Across Chassis
compatibility |
Each Chassis is a fully different game. |
ITComparison Team Comments
IBM Blades vs
Dell Blades |
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 Dell
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 Dell chassis
will follow up the same path as their current one, which mean a total lost
of investment when upgrading. |