Today, I am scheduled to present our outcomes and recommendations to our Change Control Board for replacing HP/UX PA-RISC servers with IBM BladeCenter running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  It was 6-weeks ago when the chassis arrived and we had our real, first-hand look at this well-engineered chassis.

In my position, I am most concerned with remote management, monitoring, alerting, new deployments and dynamic changes to existing assets… and reducing complexity whenever possible.  Management is more concerned with capital (and associated infrastructure requirements) and operational costs, in particular, power and cooling.  Currently, space is our least concerns, so density will not make much for a highlight.  And although I no longer hug machines, this particular model comes close for some tactile feedback.

If we succeed in gaining management approval to move forward with purchase and implementation, we will be requesting budget for an additional chassis at the main datacenter and one for our disaster recovery site.