Marathon Computer IBM BladeCenter manual Mission-Critical Blades The Need For Fault Tolerance

Introduction

•Reduced Floor Space Usage in the Data Center

Modular design reduces cost through more efficient use of valuable floor space. The increased density can significantly reduce the space require- ments in a data center.

•Reduced Cost of Power and Cooling

Blades servers integrate resources and share key components. Since blades in a chassis share common power supplies, power is distributed more efficiently and less heat is generated for a given amount of pro- cessing power.

•Increased Reliability and Availability

Since the BladeCenter may be configured with redundant hot-swap power supplies and built-in network switches, it effectively eliminates several key single points of failure and provides greater system availabil- ity than conventional rack-mount servers. The BladeCenter also reduces down-time due to server failure by making replacement of a failed server easy.

Mission-Critical Blades: The Need For Fault Tolerance

As enterprises move more compute load to blade servers, blades are becoming increasingly mission-critical. Because downtime has significant associated costs - lost sales, decreased customer satisfaction, lost produc- tivity - the need for a simple, affordable way to keep blades running continu- ously is becoming urgent. Four trends are converging to further increase the need for continuously available blades:

•Improved server density and server consolidation increases the potential risk to business operations in the event of downtime by “putting all your eggs in one basket”

•Increasingly stringent regulations require data retention and avail- ability

•More threats to security and physical systems

•Increasing complexity of enterprise infrastructure, and impact of system downtime

2 Marathon Technologies Corporation