IBM Deploys SanDisk SSDs in Blades

July 19, 2007: IBM has announced that it has picked SanDisk’s SATA 5000 2.5” solid state drive (SSD) as the storage solution of choice for its new BladeCenter HS21 XM blade servers.

Blade’s represent the merging of servers, storage, networking and applications into single systems – a design that IBM says helps eliminate overwhelming proliferation of server “farms” and the manpower and resources that maintain them.

IBM’s HS21 XM blades come with up to 32 gigabytes of RAM and up to eight I/O ports, helping to boost memory and processing performance while reducing energy costs as compared to traditional rack systems. By adding SanDisk SSD storage devices to the system, IBM claims it can further reduce power consumption while increasing reliability and performance.

Using the SSD, the company says the new blades enjoy power savings of up to 18 watts per blade, 252 watts per chassis and 1,512 watts per server rack3 – a significant offering for large data centres where every unexpended can mean big dollar savings in the long term.

“IBM is the first major blade vendor to deliver enterprise-class solid state storage in blade servers, helping clients balance datacenter cost, complexity, reliability and manageability,” Scott Tease, worldwide marketing manager for IBM BladeCenter.

“SanDisk’s SSD uses up to 87 percent less power than a conventional hard disk drive and runs with no moving parts, eliminating a common point of disk failure and making the HS21 XM blade solution even more reliable.”

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