We will introduce you to the Fujitsu hardware we have ordered and on which all our services will run – BX900 series blade servers, RX100 and RX200 1U servers and Eternus DX60 storage – including a rich photo gallery.
At the end of the article you will find a photo gallery of the products presented here.
Fujitsu
As we have already written, we have chosen as the main hardware supplier for our datacenter Fujitsu. Fujitsu Limited is a Japanese multinational company that is the third largest in its industry in the world. The hardware for Europe is manufactured in Augsburg, Germany.
This is truly professional server hardware, no garage or home PCs. All of our services run on this and this is why we are able to guarantee such high availability of our services. If you don’t believe us about the hardware, we’ll invite you to open days and you’ll be able to see for yourself.
Blade chassis
For all our services except dedicated servers – i.e. web hosting, virtual servers, mailservers, databases and all our other internal servers (our information and administration system, DNS, etc.) – we have chosen the Blade solution.
What is a blade? In the case of the Fujitsu BX900, it is up to 18 servers crammed into a common chassis. Again, it’s all about financial and energy savings, which are the advantages of a blade solution:
- cooling, power and management is shared, individual blade servers are just motherboards with CPU, memory and disks
- up to 20% lower power consumption compared to a similar solution with standalone 1U servers
- no cabling – the server is just plugged into the cabinet and thus connected to the power supply, management, switch, etc. (all connections internally in the chassis)
- Space saving – 18 full-size servers including redundant power, switches and more fit into 10U rack positions
- unified management – all connected blade servers can be viewed and administered via a single web interface
A fully occupied blade server chassis is cheaper than if we had the same number of separate 1U servers (the chassis itself is relatively expensive, but individual blade servers are cheaper), it takes up less space and consumes up to a fifth less electricity, so it needs a fifth less cooling … it’s just worth it.
Blade servers are placed in the front of the case, then power supplies, switches and management modules come from the back.
Blade server BX920 S2
This server can accommodate 2 Xeon 5500 and 5600 series processors, 9 DDR3 1333 MHz memory modules (up to 144 GB) and 2 hotswap 2.5″ drives. Through a special cable connected from the front you can bring up 4 USB ports, VGA, serial port (RS232). Up to 4 GbE interfaces are available over the chassis bus. A hardware RAID 0/1 controller is integrated. Includes management (iRMC) with KVM (remote monitor, keyboard, mouse and media connection).
It’s just similar to a 1U server, but a bit more compact.
Storage blade BX940 S1
If having only 2 drives in the blade is not enough, you can directly connect 4 more drives by putting a storage blade in the adjacent slot in the case. It’s not a server, it’s just an enclosure for 4 more hotswap 2.5″ drives and a RAID controller with RAID 5/6 support including a backup battery. It’s like plugging another controller with additional drives into a PCI slot in a 1U server. But you can’t put more than 4 discs in here. If you want more, you need to get external storage (e.g. the Eternus DX60 we used).
1U server RX100 S6
For cheaper variants of dedicated (i.e. leased) servers we will use this model. Its parameters are:
- 1 Xeon 3400 series processor
- 4 DDR3 1333 MHz memory slots, up to 32 GB RAM
- 2x GbE
- Optional RAID controller 0/1/5/6
- iRMC management with KVM capability
- max. 4 2.5″ discs
- 1 power supply without redundancy
1U server RX200 S6
Designed for better variants of leased servers. Its parameters are:
- up to 2 Xeon 5500 and 5600 series processors
- 12 DDR3 1333 MHz memory slots, up to 192 GB RAM
- 2x GbE
- Optional RAID controller 0/1/5/6
- iRMC management with KVM capability
- up to 8 2.5″ drives
- up to 2 hotswap power supplies
We have this model on loan and have published a review of it.
Storage Eternus DX60
This is a basic series of disk arrays with the following parameters:
- variants with 3.5″ or 2.5″ discs
- up to 24 discs
- 1 or 2 controllers
- RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5, 5+0, 6 support
- Fibre Channel, iSCSI or SAS interfaces
- cache memory up to 2 GB
- maximum logical capacity 5 TB
- redundant power supply and fans
- Management via web interface, SNMP, command line or ETERNUS SF Express
We have had this model on loan and have published a review of it.
What we have ordered
Within 4 weeks we should receive the following machines:
- 3x rack Fujitsu Primecenter size 46U, including cabling and management
- 2x blade chassis – one chassis would be enough for us, but if something happens to it, we can close the shop, so as a precaution we need one extra as a spare
- 2x switch for blade
- 7x blade server BX920 S2 – 2x Xeon L5630, 24 GB RAM, 2x small SATA disks (enough only for the operating system) in RAID 1 – this is for all our services – our sites and systems, webhosting, mailservers, virtual servers
- 2x blade server BX920 S2 for databases – it will have better and faster SAS 15k drives, when the capacity runs out, a storage blade will be purchased
- 2x storage Eternus DX60 – storage for web hosting data, emails and virtual servers, backups
- 1 full rack (approx. 40) of RX100 and RX200 servers in various configurations as dedicated servers
Information and photo source: Fujitsu Limited(ts.fujitsu.com)
