IBM Type 8677, Type 1881 manual General information

Chapter 1. General information

The IBM® BladeCenter E Type 8677 and 1881 unit is a high-density, high-performance rack-mounted system developed for medium-to-large businesses. It supports up to 14 blade servers, making it ideally suited for networking environments that require a large number of high-performance servers in a small amount of space. The BladeCenter system provides common resources that are shared by the blade servers, such as power, cooling, system management, network connections, and input/output (I/O) ports (diskette drive, optical drive, ports for USB, keyboard, video, mouse, and network interfaces). The use of common resources enables small blade server size, minimizes the cabling required in a working configuration, and eliminates resources sitting idle.

Performance, ease of use, reliability, and expansion capabilities were key considerations during the design of your BladeCenter system. These design features make it possible for you to customize the system hardware to meet your needs today, while providing flexible expansion capabilities for the future.

Notes:

1.Current BladeCenter E models do not have a diskette drive in the media tray. Older BladeCenter E models do have a diskette drive in the media tray. In this document, this difference is noted, when necessary, to describe differences that exist between current and older model offerings.

2.The illustrations in this document might differ slightly from your actual hardware: the illustrations do not depict a particular model offering unless noted in text.

3.Throughout this document, the terms I/O module and switch module are used to refer to switch modules and all other types of I/O module.

This Hardware Maintenance Manual and Troubleshooting Guide provides information to troubleshoot your BladeCenter unit and replace damaged parts.

This Hardware Maintenance Manual and Troubleshooting Guide and other publications that provide detailed information about your BladeCenter unit are provided in Portable Document Format (PDF) on the IBM BladeCenter Documentation CD.

The latest version of this publication is available from the IBM support Web site at http://www.ibm.com/systems/support.

If you have access to the World Wide Web, you can obtain up-to-date information about your BladeCenter model and other IBM server products at http://www.ibm.com/eserver/xseries/ on the World Wide Web.

You can register the BladeCenter unit and blade servers on the World Wide Web. To register, go to http://www.ibm.com/support/mysupport/ on the World Wide Web.

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