IBM BladeCenter PS703 Technical Overview And Introduction

Also see for BladeCenter PS703: Service guide

Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction and general description 3PS703 also supports one PCIe CIOv expansion card slot and one PCIe CFFh expansion cardslot. See 1.6.7, “I/O features” on page 21 for supported I/O expansion cards.The PS704 blade serverThe IBM BladeCenter PS704 (7891-74X) is a double-wide blade server with four eight-corePOWER7 processors with a total of 32 cores. The processors are 64-bit 8-core 2.4 GHzprocessors with 256 KB L2 cache per core and 4 MB L3 cache per core.The PS704 is a double-wide blade, meaning that it occupies two adjacent slots in the IBMBladeCenter chassis.The PS704 blade server has 32 DDR3 memory DIMM slots. The industry standard VLPDDR3 memory DIMMs are either 4 GB or 8 GB running at 1066 MHz. The minimum memoryrequired for PS704 blade server is 32 GB. The maximum memory that can be supported is256 GB (32x 8 GB DIMMs).The PS704 blade server supports optional Active Memory Expansion, which is a POWER7technology that allows the effective maximum memory capacity to be much larger than thetrue physical memory. Innovative compression/decompression of memory content usingprocessor cycles can allow memory expansion up to 100%. This can allow an AIX 6.1 or laterpartition to do significantly more work with the same physical amount of memory, or a serverto run more partitions and do more work with the same physical amount of memory.The PS704 blade server has four onboard 1 Gb integrated Ethernet ports that are connectedto the BladeCenter chassis fabric (midplane). The PS704 also has an integrated SAScontroller that supports local (on-board) storage, integrated USB controller and Serial overLAN console access through the service processor, and the BladeCenter AdvanceManagement Module.The PS704 blade server has two disk drive bays, one on the base blade and one on theexpansion unit. The on-board storage can be one or two 2.5-inch SAS HDD or up to four1.8-inch SSD drives. The integrated SAS controller supports RAID 0, 10, 5, or 6 dependingon the numbers of HDDs or SSDs installed.The PS704 supports two PCIe CIOv expansion card slots and two PCIe CFFh expansioncard slots. See 1.6.7, “I/O features” on page 21 for supported I/O expansion cards.1.2 Comparison between the PS70x blade serversThis section describes the difference between the five POWER7 blade servers: The PS700 is a single-wide blade with one 4-core 64-bit POWER7 3.0 GHz processor. The PS701 is a single-wide blade with one 8-core 64-bit POWER7 3.0 GHz processor. The PS702 is a double-wide blade with two 8-core 64-bit POWER7 3.0 GHz processors. The PS703 is a single-wide blade with two 8-core 64-bit POWER7 2.4 GHz processors. The PS704 is a double-wide blade with four 8-core 64-bit POWER7 2.4 GHz processors.The POWER7 processor has 4 MB L3 cache per core and 256 KB L2 cache per core.Note: For the PS704 blade server, the service processor (FSP or just SP) in the expansionblade is set to IO mode, which provides control busses from IOs, but does not provideredundancy and backup operational support to the SP in the base blade.