We’ve updated our high-density servers webpage with a solution tailored to small and medium businesses (SMB): the ICC Modular Server (IMS). Built on similar principles to blade servers, we are selling our IMS to organizations that can benefit from an upgrade of their current (limited) server resources to an entry-level cluster solution. Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of this product to get an idea of whether it’s right for you.

The ICC Modular Server (IMS) contains compute servers, a separate storage area network (SAN), and management modules all housed and centrally controlled within one 6U enclosure. As the name implies, all components are “modular” (so, easy to expand or replace) and hot-swappable, and cabling is absolutely minimal (just like blade servers).

There are several advantages of this type of solution over, say, having multiple 1U rack servers networked together in one’s office:

• The IMS’s modular design makes it much easier to maintain
• The complete IMS system has about the same low noise level as a 1U server (though it house six compute nodes)
• The drives are separate from the compute nodes, which allows all six of the compute nodes to access the up-to 18TB of storage in the SAN Continue reading →