EXCLUSIVE: NEC SIGMABLADE-M Blade Server

Despite being launched over five years ago it's only now that the blade server is coming on strong as many businesses start to see new ways they can offer benefits over standard rack servers. The market is heating up as serious concerns about power, cooling and maxed out utility supplies make blade servers look a more cost-effective and environmentally friendlier alternative to dense rack server installations.

Not a lot of people know this but NEC Computers has had a presence in the blade server market for over four years. However, it has never promoted its products aggressively - certainly not the to same level as IBM which is currently spending a king's ransom advertising its BladeCenter H in any form of media that comes to mind. NEC's first attempt came with its Express5800/420Ma and here we take an exclusive look at its successor - the provocatively named SIGMABLADE.

Standing at 6U high, the SIGMABLADE-M chassis is 2U higher than its predecessor and supports up eight server blades. The first thing of note is its rude construction as although it's undeniably a sturdy beast it lacks any of the elegance of HP's BladeSystem c-Class (see http://www.itpro.co.uk/servers/labs/95397/hp-blade-system-cclass.html). NEC also offers a SIGMABLADE-H chassis which stands at 10U and along with the 120 range can also use NEC's 140Ba-10 double height blade which supports Intel's 7300 Xeon MP quad-core processors. Underneath the server blade slots are small bays for up to four hot-plug power supplies. These are an unusual design as at nearly 80cms long they run the entire depth of the chassis. A raised section half way down mates with the chassis' power bus and the far end presents a standard three pin socket.

At the centre of this lower section is a panel combining a DVD drive, a couple of USB ports and an LCD display. It's not as clever as HP's Insight Display as it only provides basic chassis and blade information and allows you to swap the KVM port and integral DVD drive assignment to a selected server blade. However, it can be flipped out to reveal a couple of slots behind that take NEC's enclosure manager (EM) cards. These offer web access to the chassis and adding two EM cards provides redundancy. They can each be accessed directly via their serial or Ethernet ports or you can use the rear mounted module which also provides KVM access to the server blades.

At the rear you have room for up to five fan modules and connectivity options are reasonably good as below the fan bays are six slots for which NEC offers a choice of hot-plug modules. The review system was supplied with a basic Gigabit pass-through module which links up with both Ethernet ports on each blade. You also have a 16-port Layer 2 Gigabit switch, an 8-port 4Gbps FC module and an FC pass-through module as well. Server blade choices are more modest than those from HP and IBM as NEC currently offers three choices of Xeon based blades supporting dual- and quad-core processors. The 120Bb-6 blades in the review system each had a pair of 1.6GHz Xeon 5110 processors teamed up with 1GB of memory. Storage is handled by a RAID mezzanine card at the rear which is cabled through to a small backplane servicing the pair of hot-swap SFF SAS drive bays. It's a tidy enough solution but the drive bay does sit on top of the DIMM sockets and will need to be unscrewed and removed if you want to upgrade memory. NEC also offers a diskless blade which is designed to boot from a SAN and is aimed at storage consolidation applications. Of more interest is its storage blade as from a hardware perspective this is similar to HP's AiO SB600c solution. The 120Bb-m6 combines a standard diskless Xeon blade with a second that supports up to six hot-swap SFF SAS hard disks.