Kludged Design

After looking another time on the photo of the JS22 Power6 blade i finally know why i didn´t like the design: In an IBM blade center the cooling air is sucked from the front to the back by the fans. When you look at the blade, you find some really big heat spreader there. After the air is heaten up by the CPUS you suck it over the DIMM modules. This leads to two problems: More thermal stress to the memory and the memory adds their dissipation to the temperature of the cooling air. Finally after going over the CPU and the memory the air reaches the single non-hotswappable harddisk. Fried harddisk anyone? The RAS story of the JS22 must be horrible. By the way: You can put only 32 GB of memory in this blade, but only when you use incredible expensive and slow (533 Mhz) 8 GB memory modules. With fast or affordable memory you can only put up to 16 GB into this machine. This doesn´t exactly matches with the virtualisation/utilisation benchmarketing story. After all, IBM must have ripped many advantages of the P6 only to have a blade in the catalog: Less L2 cache, no L3 cache , less memory sockets, no redundant harddisk and so on ….