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Front view of the BladeCenter S chassis

Blade servers, disk storage modules, and the media tray are installed in the front of the BladeCenter S chassis.

Note
For proper cooling, each bay in the BladeCenter S chassis must have either a device or a filler installed.

As the BladeCenter S chassis can support either 3.5-inch disk drives or 2.5-inch disk drives in the storage bays, the front view of the chassis can appear as either of the following.

3.5-inch disk drive configuration:

Diagram showing the front of the BladeCenter S chassis when 3.5-inch disk drives are used.

2.5-inch disk drive configuration:

Diagram showing the front of the BladeCenter S chassis when 2.5-inch disk drives are used.

  • Disk storage modules
    You can install a maximum of two disk storage modules in the BladeCenter S chassis and each disk storage module contains hot-swap hard disk drives. A disk storage module and the hard disk drives installed in that disk storage module are commonly referred to as integrated shared storage because this storage is integrated in the BladeCenter S chassis and shared among the blade servers in the BladeCenter S system.
  • Media tray
    The media tray contains the DVD drive (which can be either a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive or a DVD/RW drive) and two USB v2.0 ports, which are shared by the blade servers. The media tray also contains two battery backup units, which provide backup for SAS RAID controller modules cache.
  • Blade server
    Blade servers can contain components such as microprocessors, memory, Ethernet controllers, and hard disk drives. They receive power, network connection, and I/O devices (such as DVD drive, keyboard, mouse, video port, USB ports, and a remote monitoring port) from the BladeCenter S chassis.