IBM

HP

Chassis flexibility

Provides a variety of chassis offerings to meet your specific needs
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

Blade server flexibility

Provides a large selection of blades optimized for specific workloads
Intel® Xeon®, AMD Opteron, IBM POWER™, Cell BE™

Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron, Intel Itanium®

Legacy I/O support

Provides a more seamless transition from industry-standard rack and/or tower servers to blade servers
PCI Expansion Module

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PCI Expansion Module, (c-class only)

Next-generation local storage

Helps improve reliability
Solid State Drives (SSD)

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Storage flexibility

Provides choices to meet your specific storage needs
External: NAS, FC SAN, iSCSI SAN, SAS

Internal: Solid State, Flash, SAS, SATA

External: NAS, FC SAN, iSCSI SAN

Internal: Flash, SAS, SATA

Redundancy

Helps provide end-to-end high availability
IBM designs its blades with redundant connections and its chassis with a redundant-path midplane

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Illuminated path to blade components

Helps improve reliability by identifying a component in need of maintenance—even without system power
Light Path Diagnostics

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Limited functionality

Event identification

Helps simplify problem determination
First Failure Data Capture

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Integrated 10Gb Ethernet switch modules

Delivers additional bandwidth between the blade, the chassis and the network
BladeCenter H, BladeCenter HT

Announced on c-Class only, but not available yet

Integrated 4X InfiniBand® switch modules

Provides a high-speed, low latency interconnect enabling I/O virtualization and HPC
Two ports/card, managed

Two ports/card unmanaged

Blade deployment and redeployment

Helps reduce the time it takes to deploy servers, data and storage to minutes or hours instead of days or weeks.
Open Fabric Manager, Uses standard switches, single login across 100 chassis

Virtual Connect, Uses proprietary switches, single login across four chassis

Efficient utilization of available power resources

Helps optimize resources and save money
PowerExecutive™

Power Regulator, Less functionality and over $400 charge