BladeCenter midplane and media interface card

Abstract

This paper describes the electrical architecture and design of the IBM eServere BladeCentert midplane and media interface card. The midplane provides the redundant interconnects among processor blades, switch modules, media interface card, and management modules. It also serves as the redundant power distribution medium from the power modules to all blades and other devices. A major attribute of the BladeCenter electrical design is the redundant nature of the interconnects, which gives this product superior reliability and availability. The media interface card provides the interface between the CD-ROM and floppy disk drives and the blades that share these devices. The sharing of these devices was a key BladeCenter innovation. Also, to ensure that the architecture will be flexible enough to support multiple input/output fabric protocols, SerDes (serialized/deserialized) is used as the internal high-speed communication electrical interface. Since highspeed designs can easily result in higher implementation costs, a significant predesign simulation effort was undertaken to analyze and prioritize design guidelines in order to develop a high-speed midplane at a competitive cost. This paper highlights how we reduced board costs by finding solutions that overcame some of the challenges of 2.5-Gb/s data transmission over multiple printed circuit boards and connectors.

Scale-up x Scale-out: A Case Study using Nutch/Lucene

“…The IBM BladeCenter [3], [5]solution (and similar systems from companies such as HP and Dell) represents the next step after rack-mounted clusters in scale-out systems for commercial computing. The blade servers [6] used in BladeCenter are similar in capability to the densest rack-mounted cluster servers: 4-processor configurations, 16-32 GiB of maximum memory, built-in Ethernet, and expansion cards for either Fiber Channel, Infiniband, Myrinet, or 10 Gbit/s Ethernet.…”

BladeCenter packaging, power, and cooling

“…The best solution was to create an enclosure containing a midplane [6] that could handle the vast majority of the interconnect function. The next obstacle was to define the size of the processor blade and chassis.…”

BladeCenter networking

“…The technology chosen for the I/O expansion adapter must match the technology in switch module bays 3 and 4. For details, see switch packaging, midplane interconnection, and blade I/O expansion adapter [10][11][12].…”