IBM BladeCenter HS22

The challenge was given by IBM to test Indonesia BladeCenter HS22 series servers are entered into the ranks of the product division STG (Systems and Technology Group) at IBM Indonesia. Of course, we do not miss this opportunity. Unit testing using a chassis series H.

In addition to 14 slot blade servers, chassis serial H able to load 2 fan or blower units that are redundant, the switches 4 units each with 4 LAN RJ45 slot, as well as 4 power supply units are redundant and hotswap plus have the ability to load balancing and fail-over. Each power supply also has an additional fan for cooling.

If the admin wants to use the console directly, the H series chassis is also available with a KVM station to the monitor port, USB port for keyboard and mouse, and the RJ45 port to enter into the web interface remote server management.


Through the web interface server administration, admin can do many things, including: selecting and activating each blade server, forming a series of hard disk (RAID), install the operating system, manage IP addresses on each LAN port, directing the blade server to storage, directing the use of the console (terminal) keyboard and mouse and VGA to a specific server blade, and so on.

IBM provides an application called the IBM Server Guide that will make it easier if admin chose to use the Microsoft operating system Windows Server on one bay BladeServer HS22. This application provides a variety of hardware drivers that are generally required by the operating system.

No lag, IBM includes an application called IBM Systems Director to facilitate the management of virtualization. With this application, admin can view the status of each blade server that may use different operating systems are different. Admin can define how each system is connected. Visually, all the components can be monitored, including servers, storage and networks.

 HS22 blade servers that we tested uses IBM 59Y5667 motherboard, a processor socket 2. Test unit 1 is filled with quadcore processor E5530 Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz-speed computing and Gainestown codename. CPUZ tool that our latest release pairs used to recognize the chipset as an Intel motherboard Rev. 5520. Intel 13 and 82801JR southbridge (ICH 10R).

To support the main computing, HS22 Blade Server equipped with a chip RAM DDR3 triple channel types that can accommodate up to 96 GB. Meanwhile, our test unit with 6 GB of memory.

Pair disk hotswap SAS becomes the locus for the operating system on HS22 Blade Server. Each 146 GB hard drive capacity and speed turn 10,000 rpm. Thus, the two hard drives can be arranged in RAID systems RAID 0 or 1.

Okay, let's look at the performance of this server blade. We employ two types of tests. The first test aims to see the performance of each major hardware component separately. We used SiSoft Sandra Lite tool's latest.

While the second test aims to see the performance of the hardware in the run synergy between components of one server function, in this case as a web server. In this second test we installed IIS as a "machine" and put the web page HTML and ASP pages contain complex mathematical calculation. In the computer test, we installed a tool Paessler Webserver Stress Tool that will output Whack a target server with requests for HTML pages and ASP up to 2000 requests per second, for 10 minutes.

Optimal user (active user)	280
Maximum HTML user/client (active user)	973
Maximum ASP user/client (active user)	973

Web server stress test results show that the error handling of HTML pages occurs on the user to 973, as well as an ASP page error handling. Blade Server HS22 looks still pretty responsive handling requests, less than 1000 milliseconds, up to 280 users. From our observations, there is a very significant difference in the optimal components of a user between servers that use Intel Xeon processors that use the E5530 with Intel Xeon E5550.

So you can easily be listened to, we show the results of individual performance test every hardware component in table form. Broadly speaking, we see good performance on multicore efficiency components (processor), memory bandwidth (processor), and File Systems (hard disk).

IBM BladeCenter HS22 displays excellent performance that should be the choice solution to the needs of enterprise-class servers are fast, have the flexibility of expansion, practicality in virtualization, and integration management of many servers at once.