A Comparison of IBM’s New Flex System Environment to Traditional Blade Architectures

Research Report
A Comparison of IBM’s New Flex System Environment to
Traditional Blade Architectures
Executive Summary
In this Research Report, Clabby Analytics takes a closer look at IBM’s Flex System converged
architecture. We compare the new Flex System advanced blade offering to its closest rival:
traditional blade architecture. And what we find is that Flex System offers superior manageability,
faster communications, more storage capacity (using up to eight internal solid state drives [SSDs]
per compute node) and better storage management — as well as broader/better physical/virtual
system management — than all of today’s leading blade competitors.
Introduction
For over a decade Clabby Analytics has been a big fan of blade architecture. We like blade designs
(the ability of blades to share a chassis and common components such as power supplies and fans
— reducing energy and real estate requirements). We like blade flexibility (the ability to run
multiple operating environments such as Windows, Linux, and Unix); and the ability to run
different processors (for instance, x86, POWER, and field programmable gate arrays). We like
blade extensions in reliability/availability/serviceability (RAS). And we like the way that some
blades handle virtual I/O (this simplifies the assignment of network addresses). However, today’s
blade architectures have some hardware and software limitations as compared with new “converged
systems” designs:
 Siloed system management — most blade environments offer monitor/management tools
focused on managing the physical blade environment. But, when it comes to managing
virtual (logical) machines as well as network/storage subsystems, many blade vendors rely
on 3rd
party management/infrastructure products. To manage blade environments most
efficiently, systems administrators and managers need well-integrated tools that can
manage both physical and virtual resources across the entire systems environment
(compute nodes, storage, and networks) in a cohesive, integrated manner.
 Greater Latency— Cisco blades and Hewlett-Packard blades that use Cisco’s FEX
architecture flow traffic north (up) to a Layer 3 network Top of Rack (TOR) switch (that
provides security, intrusion detection, and other services), then south (down or out) to
communicate with other compute nodes or storage devices. This slows the system down.
A more efficient approach is to offer a networking architecture with the ability to route
traffic between nodes (in an east-west) as needed.
 Chassis design — most of today’s blade chassis rely on a hardwired mesh of copper
connectors that will make it difficult (if not impossible) to support speeds beyond 40 Gb
without a chassis/midplane redesign. So, a major redesign of the market’s leading blade
architectures will need to take place to handle higher communications speeds (which
means that some blade environments may not yield the expected return-on-investment
[ROI] because the blade chassis may need replacing sooner than planned). Additionally,
today’s converged systems chassis have advantages in airflow, power consumption, and
cooling — plus room to support advanced communications adapters such as fourteen data
rate (FDR) InfiniBand (some competing blades cannot support this technology).

A Comparison of IBM’s New Flex System Environment to Traditional Blade Architectures
September, 2012 © 2012 Clabby Analytics Page 2
 Internal storage capacity and proximity — with a few exceptions, blades offer little
internal storage capacity (usually limited to two blade-attached disk drives). (Exceptions
include IBM’s BladeCenter S chassis and HP’s c3000 with HP storage blades). Further,
storage attached to the leading commercial blades is not sharable; it lacks reliability
features (such as flash copy and thin provisioning); and it lacks advanced functions such as
external virtualization, tiering, real-time compression, and clustering. Finally, because
internal storage is limited, most blades must exit the chassis to access the data that they
need. Placing storage outside of the blade enclosure means that several hops may need to
take place to access/retrieve data — creating potential bottlenecks and latency issues.
 Memory limitations — Hewlett-Packard’s workhorse BladeSystem (the BladeSystem
BL460c G8) tops out at 576Gb; and Dell’s blade environment can address 640Gb (but at 3
memory DIMMS per channel, using all 640 Gb of memory may result in unbalanced
performance). These architectures do not take advantage of the maximum capability that
Intel Xeon E5 processors can support and may, accordingly be leaving the ability to create
more virtual machines (VMs) on the table. The amount of memory available affects the
number of virtual machines that can be launched within a given blade environment. The
more virtual machines that a system can launch, the higher the systems utilization rate and,
therefore, the better the return-on-investment.
Background: IBM’s New PureSystems Family and Associated Flex System Architecture
In April, 2012, IBM announced a new family of systems known as “PureSystems”. The underlying
architecture of these PureSystems is known as Flex System (a group of compute nodes, storage
nodes, network switches, adapters, and chassis that, when blended together, form the entry point for
IBM’s PureSystem family).
The difference between PureSystems and Flex System is that IBM preconfigures PureSystems into
what they call “expert integrated systems” — configurations that use IBM’s deep systems design
and tuning expertise to fine-tune PureSystems environments. With Flex System, IBM enables
customers who may wish to utilize some non-IBM components to design and tune their own
systems by mixing and matching with Flex System components.
Both blade servers and Flex System architecture allow buyers to mix and match compute and
storage blades — and each environment offers a variety of fabrics and interconnects. But, unlike
competing blades, Flex Systems offer:
 IBM’s cross-system management appliance known as the Flex System Manager (FSM).
Flex System Manager uses a “single-pane-of-glass” management interface to manage
across compute storage and networking resources. The ability to manage across an entire
systems environment results in greater manager/administrator productivity — helping to
significantly lower operational costs related to systems/storage/network management.
 Flex Systems Manager also offers a rich collection of advanced, integrated, cross-system
virtual and physical systems management services. IBM’s VMControl module, for
instance, can manage open source KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V, EMC VMware and
PowerVM environments, all from the same management interface. Further, IBM’s SAN
Volume Controller can be launched from within Flex System Manager, and can be used to
virtualize and manage existing storage, regardless of vendor.
 Communication within Flex System architecture can be north/south as well as east/west.
By being able to pass traffic through an internal Layer 2/3 switch, latency can be reduced
by up to 50%, resulting in significantly improved performance for inter-system
communications.

 Flex System architecture offers access to large amounts of enterprise-class internal storage
(where blades typically do not). In its Flex System, IBM offers access to up to eight SSDs
(solid state disks) located within each compute node — giving each compute node access to
up to 1.6TB of local data. These SSDs can be used like extended, fast memory — and are
also positioned to provide “hot data” rapidly to compute elements. This is a unique IBM
innovation that IBM has dubbed Flex System Flash.
 IBM’s Storwise V7000 storage array can be mounted outside a Flex System chassis today
— attached by a Fibre Channel switch (which is similar to how most blades attach to
external storage today). But IBM has also issued a statement of direction regarding its Flex
System storage nodes, stating that it will deliver a Storwize V7000-like node that can be
directly mounted within a Flex System chassis and attached to the system midplane. The
first benefit of putting this large storage array within a Flex System rack is that compute
nodes will need to take fewer hops to get to data. The second benefit is that the Storwize
V7000 will be easier to manage (described in the next bullet point).
 The Flex System chassis/rack midplane connects all system components to each other.
Using the Chassis Management Module (CMM), information technology managers and
administrators can control power utilization; perform fan management, initialize the chassis
and compute nodes, manage switches, perform diagnostics on the chassis and input/output
(I/O) devices, work with security policies, perform resource discover and inventory
management, issue alerts and perform monitoring/management functions. IBM’s compute
nodes and network switches currently attach to the midplane — and IBM is expected to
attach a large storage array (the Storwize V7000-like node described previously) in the near
future (as stated previously, this is a statement of direction). When this happens, all major
systems components (compute nodes, network switches, and storage nodes) as well as
ancillary components (such as fans and power supplies) will all be connected in a unified,
converged system architecture that can be managed from a common management point.
 Finally, Flex System architecture offers more memory than the leading blade competitors.
As stated earlier, HP and Dell Blades lag Flex Systems in terms of total addressable
memory. IBM’s new x440 compute node supports up to 1.5TB of memory. What this
means is that Flex Systems managers can configure more virtual machines — delivering
higher utilization and superior ROI to the enterprise.
Market Positioning: Blades, PureSystems and Flex System
IBM offers traditional blades (found in its BladeCenter portfolio). IBM also offers a family of
converged servers known as PureSystems (these are based on IBM’s Flex System component
architecture). At present, PureSystems are offered in two configurations:
1. IBM PureApplication systems (integrated and tuned with the IBM middleware stack that
exploit “patterns of expertise” to exponentially improve performance while greatly
simplifying deployment). This design fits into a class of servers known as “Platform-as-a-
Service” (PaaS) servers. For more information on this environment, visit this Website; and,
2. IBM PureFlex systems (integrated infrastructure environments with built-in expertise, to
help clients reduce deployment time and costs). This design fits into a class of servers
known as IaaS (“Infrastructure-as-a-Service”). For more information on PureFlex, see our
report here).
In the PureApplication and PureFlex configurations, IBM adds system integration value using
“patterns of expertise” (deployment and tuning patterns developed by IBM technical experts) to
accelerate deployment and significantly improve system performance. IBM’s Flex System is

positioned to offer IT buyers the ability to build their own systems environment and populate that
environment with the infrastructure of their choice, with their own custom applications, and/or with
3rd
party packaged applications. All of these systems use the same underlying systems architecture
(chassis, compute nodes, storage nodes, switches) — but PureApplication and PureFlex systems are
tuned by IBM, while Flex System is tuned by the customer.
What Is So Special About the Flex System Design as Compared with Traditional Blade Servers?
Traditional blades are made up of compute blades and network components — and some offer on-
blade PCIe mezzanine card extensions. These components are inserted into a blade chassis.
By contrast, Flex Systems are comprised of components that make up a whole system environment:
compute nodes, storage nodes, network switches, and PCIe expansion nodes. Further, Flex
Systems also support an optional management appliance in a standard compute node form factor
known as the Flex System Manager (pictured in Figure 1 as the “management node”).
Figure 1: IBM’s Flex System Elements
Source: IBM Corporation — April, 2012
When directly comparing blade architecture to Flex System, several major differences can be
found. These differences can be found in:
 Features/functions of the compute nodes;
 The availability of an advanced management node that manages physical and virtual
systems as well as storage nodes and the network fabric;
 An advanced networking design that features high-performance and networking flexibility
 The chassis/rack design;
 The amount of memory that can be addressed by each compute node;
 The amount of solid state storage available to compute nodes;
 The capacity of storage nodes; and,
 The physical location of storage nodes.
Each of these points deserves a closer look.

The Compute Nodes
Flex System compute nodes are available in standard- and full-width form factors. These nodes use
Intel Xeon (x86-based) processors — the most recent of which is IBM’s new Flex System x440
Compute Node. This compute node includes 4-socket Xeon E5 processors, access to 48 LP DDR3
DIMMs (memory modules) offering access to up to 1.5TB of memory, a 10Gb LAN-on-
Motherboard (LOM) — and 2 hot-swap 2.5” SAS/SATA SSDs or hard drives. This node also offers
a dual enabled hypervisor as well as a VMware ESXi on flash key option.
Flex System Manager and the Chassis Management Module
IBM’s Flex System Manager (FSM) and CMM highlight the strongest difference between Flex
System and traditional blade architectures. The focal point of IBM’s Flex System architecture and
associated chassis/rack design is to build an integrated, “converged systems” environment where
all resources (systems/storage/networks) can work together in an integrated, orchestrated fashion.
According to IBM, FSM was designed from the very beginning to be the common-pane-of-glass centralized
management environment for systems managers. In the FSM world, systems managers have control over
all of the resources needed to ensure that applications can run optimally. This is to be contrasted with the
blade approach where a systems manager may use one management product set to manage physical
servers, then turn to VMware or Microsoft or to open source KVM to manage virtualized servers. In the
blade world, these same systems manager may turn-over responsibility for storage management to
another group of specialists — and the same may hold true for networking. IBM’s FSM is designed to be a
cohesive, cross-system management environment, whereas blade management software tends to be
compartmentalized.
From a systems management perspective FSM provides simplified system setup by self-discovering
the resources within a Flex System environment. Tools are available that help monitor resources —
providing health summaries, issuing alerts, enabling thresholds to be set, making updates easy to
accomplish, and streamlining service and support. The FSM environment is highly-visual, enabling
managers and administrators to intuitively understand the relationships between physical and
virtual devices. Using FSM tools, administrators and managers can view a topology map of a
systems environment, drill down for further details, and easily perform troubleshooting.
Troubleshooting responses can be automated — saving time should problems recur. And Flex
System Manager allows policies to be established and automated (such as policies to track and
automate firmware updates and software compliance). All of these functions are integrated as part
of Flex System Manager.
From a storage perspective, FSM can manage the pooling and virtualization of external storage.
And FSM enables disks to easily be defined and attached to virtual servers. Storage can be
dynamically provisioned as part of any image deployment (meaning that the amount of storage
needed by a virtual machine can be associated with that virtual server or virtual appliance image).
Policies can be established to place storage where it belongs within the storage hierarchy (known as
storage tiering). Storage can follow virtual servers using a dynamic zoning/masking approach to
virtualized storage management. And FSM storage management can be linked with other advanced
storage management facilities available in IBM’s Tivoli product set.
FSM network management allows the network switches of various leading switch providers to be
managed from one common interface. FSM’s network management facilities allow network
components to be discovered and inventoried — and the status of these components can be
constantly monitored. IBM offers support for KVM, pHyp, and VMware virtual switches as well
as for physical switches as well. From a network management perspective, administrators and
managers can see not only the server activities, but also the related network activities. So
administrators and managers can see virtual machine activities per virtual machine — and gather
performance statistics to gauge network performance and to locate network trouble spots. Further,

because FSM provides logical views of servers and network resources grouped by subnet and
VLAN (virtual LAN), administrators and managers can easily visualize network behavior and make
performance adjustments accordingly. Finally, the FSM provides the ability to automatically
provision and move VLANs — enabling VLANs to be configured to support the networking
demands of virtual machines.
Virtualization management is impressive within the Flex System Manager, as is “built-from-the-
ground-up” security. FSM provides virtualization facilities to manage virtual servers and hosts,
virtual server lifecycle management (so unused virtual servers are returned to the resource pool),
topology maps, and more. Editing and relocating virtual resources is straightforward to
accomplish. Virtual images can easily be created, deployed, imported, or captured. And numerous
advanced virtualization features are offered as part of Flex System management (see Figure 2).
Figure 2 — IBM Flex System Manager — Advanced, Integrated Virtualization
* IBM has released a statement of direction for the energy automation features displayed here.
Source: IBM Corporation — September, 2012
Flex System Manager also features centralized user security management controls using secure
communications protocols, centralized user management, and simplified security policies (includ-
ing low, medium, high security profiles) that can be centrally managed from the FSM or CMM.
The CMM module offers administrators and managers a secure chassis environment that provides
secure boot facilities, secure protocols, user-level management, signed firmware — and IBM will
soon support TCG Dynamic Root of Trust Measurement (DRTM). Further, the CMM provides
support for power management, compute node initialization, switch management, and it can
perform diagnostics on the chassis and input/output (I/O) devices.
Early customer feedback indicates that IT executives really like the combination of FSM and CMM. With
these offerings, managers and administrators can understand what is going on in their information
systems environments across entire systems as opposed to understanding what is going on in
system/storage/network silos. With FSM and CMM tools, managers and administrators gain a better
understanding of how their information systems are being utilized; they can more easily find trouble spots;

and they can produce hard-evidence that their systems environments are running optimally (this is useful
when it becomes necessary to go to the chief financial officer’s office to ask for more funding to support
new initiatives or to serve growing capacity). Managers and administrators also like the ability to model
application behaviors using FSM — a feature that helps in capacity planning.
Switches and the Communications Subsystem
One of the biggest differentiators between traditional blade architecture and Flex System
architecture can be found in the switching facilities. Blades employ a top-of-rack switching
approach that sends all traffic through a layer 3 switch (various management and security functions
happen at layer 3). This creates processing overhead — and this overhead creates latency. Because
Flex System can avoid layer 3 switching (if so desired) by using a Layer 2/3 internal switch, the
amount of latency in program-to-program communications, or disk read/writes within a Flex
System chassis can be cut in half. For IT buyers who need high performance, this is a major
advantage.
The Chassis/Rack Design
IBM bills its Flex System chassis as “the chassis of tomorrow” and claims that this chassis has been
designed to handle compute, storage, and networking requirements for the next decade. Implied in
this positioning is that IBM will constantly update the modules that fit into this chassis — but the
chassis will not change (thus protecting customer investments in the chassis itself while enabling
customers to constantly upgrade to the latest/greatest compute nodes, storage devices, and
switches). The chassis itself takes up 10U worth of space in a standard rack or the Flex System
rack (a 19-inch T42 rack with network components and a built-in IBM Storwizev7000 storage
subsystem). This chassis can hold up to 14 half-width compute nodes. From a networking
perspective, this rack offers much faster communications speeds than traditional blades with high
performance 10Gb Ethernet switches with 40Gb uplinks, 8/16Gb Fibre Channel, FDR/QDR
InfiniBand as compared with the 10Gb Ethernet, 4/8Gb Fibre Channel, and QDR InfiniBand of
blade architectures.
At Clabby Analytics, we believe that all major blade vendors will need to rebuild their blade chassis
environments in order to support high speed 100Gb Ethernet and faster connections in the future. And
this belief is supported by the research of Daniel Bowers of Ideas International who wrote an excellent
research report entitled “Is Your Blade Chassis Obsolete?” in which he describes the hardwire
connections within various blade designs. As he describes it “most of today’s blade enclosures have one
thing in common: a roughly rectangular circuit board midplane built into the enclosure that connects the
individual blade servers to I/O devices through a hard-wired "mesh" of copper connections”. Bowers
contends that the “style and number of connections in this mesh defines how much I/O bandwidth the
blade chassis can handle”. All of today’s leading blade servers can handle 10Gb Ethernet — and even
converged Ethernet — but cannot handle higher speeds such as the 40Gb Ethernet and faster speeds
available today in IBM Flex System.
Blade Storage vs. Flex Architecture — Proximity Is Important
Typically, traditional blade servers offer slots for two disk drives located on the blade. IBM’s Flex
System architecture provides access to up to eight solid state drives within a single compute node.
As IBM states it: “this places hot data closer to the processor”. The proximity of data is extremely
important because the closer data can be placed to a processor, the faster it can be executed.
We also observe that IBMs eight internal, on-the-compute-node SSDs can act as extended memory
that can accelerate the processing of applications that benefit from high IOPS (input/output per
second) performance. Applications that should perform extremely well within a Flex System
environment include various data mining and database applications, multimedia streaming and

Clabby Analytics
http://www.clabbyanalytics.com
Telephone: 001 (207) 846-6662
© 2012 Clabby Analytics
All rights reserved
September, 2012
Clabby Analytics is an independent technology research and
analysis organization. Unlike many other research firms, we
advocate certain positions — and encourage our readers to find
counter opinions —then balance both points-of-view in order to
decide on a course of action. Other research and analysis
conducted by Clabby Analytics can be found at:
www.ClabbyAnalytics.com.
video-on-demand, a wealth of financial services applications (that rely on results for quick decision
making), surveillance and security applications (especially for real time security checks against
reference materials), and video rendering.
Summary Observations
IBM’s Flex System architecture has many technical hardware and software advantages over
traditional blades. But this does not mean blade architecture is dead. From a hardware perspective,
traditional blades may use hardware components not yet available on Flex System architecture
(such as cell processors or FPGA or other components) to execute specialized workloads. Or
traditional blades may run custom software that has not yet been certified to run on Flex System
architecture. Or there may be consistency reasons to continue to deploy traditional blades (such as
an established management environment, skill sets, and even sparing considerations).
On the other hand, Flex System architecture can:
 Significantly reduce management costs because Flex Systems are managed as systems
instead of discrete components. Managing entire systems (systems/storage/ networking)
enables managers and administrators to build and manage systems more efficiently —
reducing management costs related to human labor. Further, by managing blades as part of
an integrated systems environment, IT executive management can gain a better
understanding of how efficient their systems are running — and IT managers can model
new workloads (assisting in capacity planning). These are strong run-the-business benefits
of a centrally managed, integrated systems environment;
 Reduce network latency by up to 50% using an internal switch;
 Accommodate future growth with a chassis/rack built for future designs (such as greater
than 100Gb switching);
 Considerably improve processing speed by placing data closer to processors (in larger
memory than offered by most blade vendors — and on internal high-speed solid state disk
drives); and,
 Deliver superior ROI through increased system utilization. Because Flex System can
support more memory, users can load more VM’s onto the same number of CPU’s.
Based upon these management and performance benefits, we suggest that IT executives perform an
analysis that weighs the acquisition and management costs of existing blade architectures against these
new Flex System converged systems architectures. We are certain that IT executives will find that Flex
System architecture can tremendously reduce operational costs related to cross system management —
while offering higher utilization and significantly better performance than traditional blades (and this will
result in much stronger return-on-investment).

A Comparison of IBM’s New Flex System Environment to Traditional Blade Architectures

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