Lenovo Blade Servers [EOL] was previously known as Blade Servers, IBM Blade Servers, x86 BladeServers.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Support Engineer-Enterprise System at a tech services company | 3.5 | I find this solution easy to deploy, performant, and low maintenance, with no stability or scalability issues in five years. While it lacks an integrated DVD/CD ROM, I advise planning future needs, as setup requires technical knowledge. |
| Project Manager | Service Delivery Coordinator at kyndryl | 4.5 | I have used the IBM BladeCenter H for eight years, valuing its density, redundancy, and easy setup, finding it superior to HP. While scalability is expensive, I recommend it for those with experience, despite modular hardware trends. |
| Design and Develpement Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees | 4.5 | I use this stable, scalable virtualization server, valuing its CPU/RAM and support. Though FCoE setup is complex and storage needs improvement, it's end-of-sale, replaced by the IBM Flex System that includes storage. |
| Sr. System Administrator at a consumer goods company with 501-1,000 employees | 4.5 | I value the central management and performance of this IBM blade solution. However, firmware upgrades and initial setup are difficult and costly. Customer service is excellent, and I've had no scalability issues despite its age. |
| IT Infrastructure Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees | 3.5 | I like its small form factor and scalability for medium applications. Performance is generally good, though it struggles with non-linear workloads. I recommend it for medium-to-light use and hope for advanced redundancy improvements. |
| System Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees | 4.0 | I've used these stable, scalable IBM servers for over a year, enabling critical operations without downtime. Deployment, stability, and customer service are excellent. My only improvement suggestion is for better IBM warranty extension processes. |
| CIO at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees | 4.0 | I've used this solution for over four years, valuing its reliability and expandability. It saves space and has no stability issues. While customer service is good, I believe the management software needs improvement. |
| Sr. Systems Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.0 | I found this solution excellent for virtualization density, despite troublesome firmware updates and poor customer service, which even caused issues. Overall, it was stable and scalable. |
| Senior Manager of IT at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.0 | No summary available |
| Head of Data Center at a tech company with 51-200 employees | 3.0 | I recommended the IBM BladeCenter S for its built-in storage and value. However, I experienced data loss due to poor vendor support. I advise choosing knowledgeable vendors and including implementation services to ensure data protection and smooth setup. |
We have separate compute module know as FSM for management.
Easy to deploy with better performance and less maintenance.
Integrated DVD/CD ROM.
Five years.
No issues to date.
It is every important that you should be very clear with your future plans. We have had no scalability issues to date.
OK.
We switched because it is good to maintain a hybrid infrastructure.
Need some level of technical knowledge to configure it.
Licensing depends upon your budget and pricing depends upon your requirements
No other vendors, but we evaluated price and technical options and local support in our market.
Be sure with your requirements and confirm all the technical aspects, considering your future needs, especially while choosing an I/O module for network and fiber.
The features of this product that I value most are:
I have been using, installing, and implementing this solution for eight years.
I had no problems installing the equipment.
So far, I have had no stability problems.
If we talk about scalability, it is quite expensive , especially when you need to buy more blades. It's even more expensive if you configure them for high performance parts.
Exelent
Technical Support:Technical support is excellent.
I had some experience with its direct competitor, the HP Blade line. In my opinion, the HP product has a higher rate of failure than IBM Blades.
Initial setup was not complex at all. The wizard integrated in the administration module (AMM) made things fast and easy.
I implemented the chassis by myself.
My recommendation is to always have your maintenance contract up to date. This product has been on the market for more than 10 years; it is the obvious thing to do.
I try to implement the options of both Cisco and HP, I was convinced the superiority of the IBM proposal
Despite the fact that we are living in the cloud era, in my opinion, we still need hardware in our own datacenters. I believe that the hybrid cloud is the future, and we are going to keep buying hardware adequate for this solution, even more so in third-world countries, where computing power needs are not as big.
In my opinion, modular hardware technology is disappearing. There is a tendency to buy standalone servers that are much cheaper and offer similar or better performance.
IBM replaced the BladeCenter line with the Flex Chassis. However, that Flex system is way more expensive than the BladeCenter, and it doesn’t sell as well as Blades.
My recommendation is, if you have the money and you have significant experience with modular servers, go for the IBM Flex System Chassis.
We use it as a virtualization server with ESX. We provide telecom services on it.
The storage part of this product needs to be improved. If storage is also attached to this bundle, it would be a good solution for the databases.
In the new version of this product, the IBM Flex System, the storage feature is also available with the CPU and memory.
I have used this solution for three years.
We have not encountered any stability issues.
There were no scalability issues.
The technical support is very good.
It is my first solution.
Configuring FCoE is complex.
We evaluated Cisco UCS and HPE BladeSystem c7000.
This product is now at the end of sale. The IBM Flex System has replaced it. It seems to be a better solution because the storage part is also included in it.
Central management of all blade servers and performance: It helps us to access blade servers remotely even at boot time, as well, when we can access the BIOS setup remotely. Other than that, we can restart and shut down blade servers from a single console.
The blade center and blade server’s hardware firmware upgrade should be easy.
The hardware firmware upgrade option of blade servers and chassis should include the blade center admin console itself.
I have used it for nine years.
Because this is an old IBM blade chassis model and servers, we faced a couple of issues during VMware implementation.
I have not encountered any scalability issues.
Technical support is 10/10.
Initial hardware setup is bit difficult regarding interconnectivity and the firmware upgrade on the blade chassis and servers. I recommend that it should be done by the IBM tech team.
For servers, proper sizing should be done in terms of processing, memory, storage, etc., along with the IBM team. Sometimes the cost of product increases if it is oversized.
Blade servers are better than traditional servers, but cost-wise, a blade center solution is more expensive than traditional servers, so if blade servers are the best fit for your environment, then you should go for it.
The form factor is good for medium-level application hosting and does not take up too much space in the DC.
I’d like to see new features with advanced redundancy techniques.
Performance is good, but on heavily non-linear workloads, they tend to have some issues.
It is perfect for medium to light applications and workloads.
The servers have enabled us to run critical applications, back up of critical data, and storage systems on the same products without downtime issues that could otherwise be caused by hardware/software issues.
Warranty extension may be required at times. After the warranty elapses, IBM can organize this so that clients who are still using servers or any other IBM products, can continue using the products.
I've been using it for one year, five months.
No issues at the moment.
No issues at the moment, they are generally stable.
No issues at the moment, the servers are well designed for growth.
Generally OK. The warranty centre is readily accessible, and parts are shipped immediately when they are ordered.
Technical Support:The engineers are well trained, together with their business partners
We're able to use them for both VMware clusters and clusters of database servers with the same architecture as our hardware configuration.
It needs better management software.
We used this solution for more then four years.
No issues encountered.
No issues encountered.
9/10
Technical Support:9/10
Before this solution, we used rack mount servers, but this solution saves physical spaces and increases reliability.
We migrated step-by-step in all three of our locations. Every location has two BladeCenter systems.
We implemented it through a vendor team due to them having better knowledge than us.
The question of ROI wasn't important for us, and we needed a reliable system for our production environment.
We have a long-time partnership with the vendor (ITS) and IBM.
We replaced five 42U server racks with two IBM S Series Blade Center chassis.
Firmware updates are troublesome and difficult.
I've used it for four years.
No issues encountered.
No issues encountered.
No issues encountered.
Technical support was reasonable, but leaves room for improvement. Firmware changes were barely supported, and escalation was difficult. Ultimately I was referred to a third party vendor for NIC firmware that crippled my blades when I applied the IBM image downloaded from IBM.com.
No previous solutions were in place.
The initial setup was mainly straightforward, but somewhat complex due to the technology. However, this was reasonable considering the nature of the hardware environment, blade\chassis\SAN
It was a vendor assisted implementation, their hands on experience was very helpful in several key configuration areas. I would recommend involving someone who has actual experience with product.
Compared offerings from HP IBM had a better presence and greater offering.
I believe that blade servers have become popular building blocks for enabling converged data centers – and, they also have their own idiosyncrasies.
Blade solutions provide increased server density, better power and cooling efficiency and more flexible management functions when compared with standalone servers. They require a fair bit of investment, which is why they aren’t a good choice if you only need to deploy a couple of servers.
I have personally built and used numerous server types and brands. I’ve deployed them in land based facilities across the globe and on occasion even aboard ship – which is a huge challenge in itself.
In my line of work speed is critical to mission success and it’s extremely important that equipment be easy to install, compatible with the existing environment… simply put expeditionary.
The one brand that has consistently met the rigorous challenges of global deployment and mastered the most demanding workloads has been the IBM power blade solutions.
IBM blade solutions save you time and trouble. Here's how:
•Unlike other vendors, IBM deliver power blades and chassis preassembled. You don't spend hours installing processors, memory and drives.
•You can rack an entire integrated chassis in the time it takes to rack a traditional 1U rack server.
•When you need to add additional blade servers, they slide right in.
•IBM’s BladeCenter® family technology ties Media Access Control (MAC) and World Wide Name (WWN) addresses to blade slots — not to servers or switch ports — so reconfiguring your setup is as simple as sliding a blade out of a slot and replacing it with another.
And when needed, their flexible deployment services put IBM expertise and manpower at your fingertips.
Moving beyond conventional server technology to a fresh approach at solving customer problems IBM, recently announced a new family of solutions called PureSystems. IBM calls this an “expert integrated solution”; it fits within the converged infrastructure environment.
While IBM offers competitive blade server and chassis offerings, it’s almost certain that “PureSystems” will lead the charged toward the converged infrastructure market; that’s my opinion.
I recommended the purchase of an IBM BladeCenter S Chassis with four HS 22 Blade Servers and 1 Disk storage system. I came up with the recommendation after reviewing other blade servers at that time. The other option was an HP C3000 with BL460 blade servers. What sold me with the BladeCenter S was the built-in disk storage system. For me, this is a great feature as you technically have a direct-attached disk storage system on the blade system itself. This for me was the better option than the HP C3000, as there is no need any more to buy a separate disk storage system.
It was quite unfortunate that I lost data while using this blade server. There were a lot of factors, but I believe it should not have happened. I base this from the fact that we haven't lost any data from our HP C3000 enclosure and BL460 blade servers. One of the main things that I believe led to the data loss was the poor eco-system of vendors and knowledgeable solution providers for IBM in our part of the country. The vendor that sold us was just box-pushing the product without adequate knowledge in providing a solution that should not loose any data. I say this because we have another blade system from Cisco and it just works. We have a very knowledgeable system integrator and they provide excellent support. I just wish IBM here would also do the same.Overall, the product has great value for money. Under the right circumstances, I would definitely recommend this product. You should select a vendor that is knowledgeable about the solution and offer all the necessary components to protect the disk storage system from catastrophic data loss.
Also, make sure that you include implementation services as well. Though I was able to successfully configure the blade system without any help from the vendor or IBM representatives, it took a lot of time and a lot of experimentation. Implementation services can cost a lot, but for me it would be well worth it considering the investment on this product is significant.
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