Dell M1000e
In June 2013, Dell introduced the PowerEdge VRTX, which is a smaller blade system that shares modules with the M1000e.
Next to this is a small LCD screen with navigation buttons which allows one to get system-information without the need to access the CMC/management system of the enclosure.
And the same applies to the Mezzanine cards B and C. All available I/O modules (except for the PCM6348, MXL an MIOA) have 16 internal ports: one for each half-size blade.
A maximum of two on-blade hot-pluggable 2.5-inch hard-disks or SSDs and a choice of built-in NICs for Ethernet or converged network adapter (CNA), Fibre Channel or InfiniBand.
The server has the Intel 5520 chipset and a Matrox G200 video card[7] A full-height blade server that has the same capabilities as the half-height M610 but offering an expansion module containing x16 PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 expansion slots that can support up to two standard full-length/full-height PCIe cards.
A half-height server with up to 2x 22-core Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3/v4 CPUs, running the Intel C610 chipset and offering up to 768 GB RAM memory via 24 DIMM slots, or 640 GB RAM memory via 20 DIMM slots when using 145w CPUs.
Amulet HotKey offers a modified M630 server that can be fitted with a GPU or Teradici PCoIP Mezzanine module.
A maximum of four on-blade hot-pluggable 2.5" hard-disks or SSD's and a choice of built-in NICs for Ethernet or converged network adapter, Fibre Channel or InfiniBand.
The video card is a Matrox G200.The server has the Intel 5520 chipset[11] A two-socket version of the M710 but now in a half-height blade.
The M820 offers a choice of 3 different on-board converged Ethernet adaptors for 10 Gbit/s Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) from Broadcom, Brocade or QLogic and up to two additional Mezzanine for Ethernet, Fibre Channel or InfiniBand I/O[13] A full-height server of the 11th generation with up to 4x 10-core Intel XEON E7 CPU or 4 x 8 core XEON 7500 series or 2 x 8 core XEON 6500 series, 512 Gb or 1 Tb DDR3 RAM and two hot-swappable 2,5" hard-drives (spinning or SSD).
Standard blade-servers have one or more built-in NICs that connect to the 'default' switch-slot (the A-fabric) in the enclosure (often blade-servers also offer one or more external NIC interfaces at the front of the blade) but if one want the server to have more physical (internal) interfaces or connect to different switch-blades in the enclosure one can place extra mezzanine cards on the blade.
But regardless of the local and boot-storage: the majority of the data used by blades will be stored on SAN or NAS external from the blade-enclosure.
Dell has put the EqualLogic PS M4110 models of iSCSI storage arrays[19] that are physically installed in the M1000e chassis: this SAN will take the same space in the enclosure as two half-height blades next to each other.
it is a "normal" iSCSI SAN: the blades in the (same) chassis communicate via Ethernet and the system does require an accepted Ethernet blade-switch in the back (or a pass-through module + rack-switch): there is no option for direct communication of the server-blades in the chassis and the M4110: it only allows a user to pack a complete mini-datacentre in a single enclosure (19" rack, 10 RU) Depending on the model and used disk driver the PS M4110 offers a system (raw) storage capacity between 4.5 TB (M4110XV with 14 × 146 Gb, 15K SAS HDD) and 14 TB (M4110E with 14 x 1 TB, 7,2K SAS HDD).
The A bays connect the on-motherboard NICs to external systems (and/or allowing communication between the different blades within one enclosure).
The external interfaces are mainly meant to be used as uplinks or stacking-interfaces but can also be used to connect non-blade servers to the network.On the link-level PCM switches support link aggregation: both static LAG's as well as LACP.
All Ethernet extension modules for the MXL can also be used for the rack based N4000 series (fka Power connector 8100).
The MXL 10/40 Gbit/s blade switch will run FTOS[30] and because of this will be the first M1000e I/O product without a Web graphical user interface.
The I/O aggregator supports FCoE and DCB (Data center bridging) features[31] Dell also offered some Cisco Catalyst switches for this blade enclosure.
Besides the Dell M1000e enclosure Cisco offers similar switches also for HP, FSC and IBM blade-enclosures.
It also allows the network manager to aggregate uplinks from physically different switch-units into one logical link.
It uses either the B or C fabrics to connect the Fibre Channel mezzanine card in the blades to the FC based storage infrastructure.
Total aggregate bandwidth 384 GB[49] As the 5424, the 4424 is also a Brocade SAN I/O offering 16 internal and 8 external ports.
Infiniband offers high bandwidth/low-latency intra-computer connectivity such as required in Academic HPC clusters, large enterprise datacenters and cloud applications.
The CMC modules in the enclosure offer management Ethernet interfaces and do not rely on network-connections made via I/O switches in the blade.
Once the IP address is set or known the operator can access the webgui using the default root-account that is built in from factory.
This connection is referred to inside the system as 'blade 17' and allows one a local interface to the CMC management cards.
This feature allows the system administrators to use dedicated or fixed MAC addresses and World Wide Names (WWN) that are linked to the chassis, the position of the blade and location of the I/O interface.
The flex-addresses are stored on a SD-card that is inserted in the CMC module of a chassis and when used it overwrites the address burned in into the interfaces of the blades in the system.
Depending on the required redundancy one can use a 2+2 or 3+3 setup (input redundancy where one would connect each group of supplies to two different power sources) or a 3+1, 4+2 or 5+1 setup, which gives protection if one power-supply unit would fail - but not for losing an entire AC power group[1]
