The Noise Chronicles: The IBM BladeCenter S

You can't be expected to do business with a vacuum cleaner running in the same room, but some servers produce acoustical noise that amounts to the same thing. This time we'll look at the IBM BladeCenter S chassis, whose designers claim to have slain the noise monster.We've looked at server noise levels from various mini-towers servers (i.e., that would be of interest to small offices) from Fujitsu, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Sun did not have mini-towers so we looked at low-end rack-mounted servers. We'll now do something similar with the IBM BladeCenter S.

Basically, the BladeCenter S comes with an "Office Ready Kit" that aims it at the SMB market. The kit filters dust, cuts energy consumption, and more to the point for this discussion, cuts acoustical noise to 60 decibels, says its press release.

(The 60-decibel rating, incidentally, does not claim to be an industry-standard L-WAd or the L-pAm rating, and BladeCenter S is not listed on IBM's Acoustical Noise Declarations for Selected IBM Products Web page. The page does, however, include a rating for the IBM eServer BladeCenter Express, which gives an L-pAm of 60 decibels for a fully-configured unit, both idling and operating. This gives credence to the 60-decibel claim for the BladeCenter S.)

Sixty decibels is in the range of normal conversationbut unremitting normal conversation can also be distracting in a small space. Also, 60 decibels is significantly louder than the mini-tower systems we've looked at.

Obviously, for a small office, you will want some kind of enclosure if you are going to move up to rack units.

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