NEC SigmaBlade M: Blade Server Product Overivew and Insight

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Read user reviews of NEC Sigmablade M S1

Bottom Line:

The SigmaBlade is a good pick for those companies asking: “We don’t have much to spend, what’s a respectable lower-cost unit?” That said, the Sigma is a worthy budget choice, and can be bulked up as the budget permits.

Furthermore, it’s fully capable of moving and migrating virtual machines without delay, so this an up-to-date unit.

It’s clearly good enough for SMBs making their first foray into blades, but this product is unlikely to attract much interest from those already purchasing top-tier HPE, Dell or Cisco blades. But its reasonable price-tag and decent amount of compute in a small package earns it spot in today’s data centers.

Product Description:

SigmaBlade M enclosures feature hot-swap redundant components (power supply, management cards, cooling fans), server blades and switch modules in an eight-blade chassis that takes up 6U of rack space. Its compact size is ideal for small businesses and mid-sized systems. It provides monitoring of the status of each blade, and easier cabling through the use of KVM switches. Pass-through and switch options are available in either 1 gigabyte Ethernet or Fibre Channel speeds. Management modules, redundant power supply modules and fans ensure servers run with high availability.

Eight compute blades and six switch modules can be fit into the chassis. These can be:

• Four-socket B140a-T Xeon blades for mission-critical database and ERP systems.

• Two-socket B120a Xeon 5500 blades for server consolidation, web applications, email, clustering, and scientific computation.

• B120a-d SAN Boot blades for migrating between systems, virtualization, and server consolidation. It features the Xeon 5500, extra memory, and expansion slots.

• AD106a storage and I/O blade for large capacity storage with RAID, and scalable expansion support.

Operating systems and applications can be automatically installed on additional server blades as workloads increase, based on policy settings. SigmaSystemCenter (SSC) automatically adds servers by configuring storage and network settings and installing operating systems and applications. SSC shares resources and responds to changes in load. Even in virtual environments, a new server can be built when a high-load status is detected. A virtual machine can be moved using the live migration function without stopping operations. There is also the SigmaBlade-H enclosure which can house 16 blades in 10U, which is targeted at enterprise systems and features a high-speed backplane that ensures maximum system performance.

“Efficient systems equipped with modern technology are vital. The systems implemented by NEC make our operations more efficient, and help us in providing world class service,” said a CIO in transportation.

Max Processors/Cores:

2 Xeon 5500 series/8 cores.

Maximum Memory:

128 GB

Form Factor:

Full width.

Key Markets and Use Cases:

• SMBs

• Mid-sized enterprises

• Server consolidation

Price:

Starting at around $1,000.