SAN JOSE, Calif. – IBM announced PureSystem, the next major generation of its blade server design that packs servers, storage and networking into one box. The system is part of an industry-wide trend to integrate and simplify the management of the increasingly complex pieces of a data center.
The PureSystems chassis holds four modules that can be any mix of IBM Power or x86 processor boards or hard or solid-state disk drive modules. The processor boards will initially be based on IBM Power 7 or Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs.
Two network switching modules slot into the sides of the chassis and use technology IBM acquired with Blade Network Technologies
in late 2010. PureSystem will support 10 and 40 Gbit/s Ethernet, Infiniband and Fibre Channel over Ethernet.
The chassis also includes a built-in systems management unit based on an Intel processor. It automates the process of allocating the systems processors and memory to specific tasks, discovers new modules as they are added and handles firmware upgrades.
Multiple chassis can be linked together with up to four chassis in a standard rack.
“We wanted to engineer a system designed to last for a decade with upgradeable networks, servers or storage in form factor replaceable modules,” said Ambuj Goyal, general manager of development and manufacturing in IBM’s server group.
Users can generate multiple virtual machines running different operating systems as needed to handle their applications. PureSystems supports VMWare and Microsoft HyperV hypervisors as well as Windows Server, Linux and IBM AIX operating systems.
“Nobody has really thought through in this way how you support a hypervisor or OS as a workload with security and virtualization built in and flexibility for how you configure the system,” Goyal said.
IBM is pitching its PureSystem to all its Intel server and mid-tier and lower Power server users as the most flexible and cost effective of its servers. The design started four years ago as Project Clean Slate, effectively re-thinking the concept of blade servers IBM and competitors such as Hewlett-Packard helped popularize.
Rodney Adkins, senior vice president of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, with the IBM PureSystem.