Chapter 2

System Architecture Overview

BladeSymphony 1000 features a very modular design to maximize flexibility and reliability. System elements are redundant and hot-swappable so the system can be easily expanded without downtime or unnecessary disruption to service levels. The key components of the system, illustrated in Figure 2, consist of:

Server Blades — Up to eight depending on module, available with Intel Xeon or Itanium processors

Storage Modules — up to two modules supporting either three or six SCSI drives

I/O Modules — available with PCI-X slots, PCIe slots, or Embedded Fibre Channel Switch, up to two modules per chassis

Small footprint chassis containing a passive backplane — eliminates a number of FC and network cables

Redundant Power Modules — up to four hot-swap (2+1 or 2+2) modules per chassis for high reliability and availability

Redundant Cooling Fan Modules — four hot-swap (3+1) per chassis standard configuration for high reliability and availability

Switch & Management Modules — hot-pluggable system management board, up to two modules per system for high reliability and availability

Cooling fan module

I/O module

Backplane

Server blade

Switch &

management

module

Power module

Storage module

Figure 2. Key BladeSymphony 1000 components

The server blades and I/O modules are joined together through a high speed backplane. Two types of server blades are available: Intel Xeon Server Blade and Intel Itanium Server Blade. A 10 RU BladeSymphony 1000 server chassis can accommodate eight server blades of these types. It can also accommodate a mixture of server blades, as well as storage modules. In addition, multiple Intel Itanium Server Blades can be combined to build multiple Symmetric Multi Processor (SMP) configurations. Figure 3 shows a logical diagram of modules interconnecting on the backplane for a possible configuration with one SMP server and one Intel Xeon server, as well as various options for hard drive and I/O modules.

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BladeSymphony 1000 Architecture White Paper

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Hitachi 1000 manual System Architecture Overview