I recently attended the IBM Business Partner Leadership Conference (BPLC), where our sales director, Gareth Pritchard, and I received on behalf of Centiq the fantastic honour of a Beacon Award 2012.

IBM devotes a big part of the BPLC programme to recognize and reward innovation and development by its thousands of worldwide partners.  Only 27 gain the coveted Beacon Award.  To our delight, Centiq received one of them: the Outstanding Optimised Workload Solutions category.

In September 2009 IBM announced the availability of SAP Business Warehouse Accelerator on the BladeCenter S. Now, just over 18 months later, IBM no longer approve this solution for new systems. However, all systems already in the field are still supported.

The BladeCenter S solution bought BWA functionality to users at a much lower price point than the BladeCenter H solution. Although it suffered from limited redundancy and scalability the BladeCenter S did prove a popular choice with Centiq customers. To plug the gap left by this mini BladeCenter IBM submitted the System X x3850 X5 server to SAP for qualification. The system has been tested and approved for use with BWA. So, if you are looking for a small BWA solution at a low price point, then maybe you should be considering the IBM System X x3850 X5.

I find myself shrug apathetically to most technology announcements and the BladeCenter S was no exception.  I remember wondering "Why would anyone want a small IBM BladeCenter with built in SAS storage?".  Most of my experience with the IBM BladeCenter is with larger SAP BWA projects where customers want a large number of blades coupled with enterprise performance storage, so the BladeCenter S just didn't seem useful.