By David Hamlton, theWHIR.com
October 24, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — IBM (www.ibm.com) and Intel Corporation (www.intel.com) are extending their collaboration in the blade server market to drive adoption of an “open industry specification for blade switches” enabling switch vendors to make products to a standardized design for blade switches, which channel server data, serving an essential role in every blade system.
According to an announcement Thursday, IBM will extend its BladeCenter switch specification for blade servers to interface standardization organization Server Systems Infrastructure (www.ssiforum.org) on a royalty-free basis, allowing switch vendors to create one product that works across the BladeCenter and SSI ecosystems.
Also, together with Intel, IBM plans to help SSI establish a third-party SSI Switch Compliance Lab, where the developer community can test and verify their blade server products for BladeCenter and SSI environments. In its more than 10 year history, SSI has enabled server builders to develop compliant and interoperable building blocks for servers, chassis and manageability software technology. The availability of the open BladeCenter switch specification to SSI members allows them access to the more than 25 specification-compliant switches on the market today.
“The extension of the BladeCenter switch specification to SSI advances open specifications for blade systems,” IBM BladeCenter vice president Alex Yost said in a statement. “Making the switch design in our open BladeCenter specification available to a broader set of vendors demonstrates IBM’s commitment to foster openness in the blade server market.”
IBM and Intel have been in collaboration on blade technology since 2002 when they developed the first BladeCenter servers. In 2006, IBM, Intel and other industry leaders formed industry consortium Blade.org, when drove open innovation in blade-based technology that now has more than 200 members.
Blade Network Technologies, Brocade, NextIO, QLogic and others have already committed their support for the open specification. As blade servers become an increasingly critical ingredient in IT infrastructure, the demand for a common switch specification is closely following according to IBM.
“By working with IBM, we have expanded ecosystem support for SSI blade specifications to over 70 vendors,” Intel server platforms group general manager Kirk Skaugen said in a statement. “Continued IBM and Intel collaboration will go further to expanding the entire blade server market. This is good for customers who will benefit from increased choice from a breadth of server, networking and storage vendors while enabling each product to maximize return on the R&D invested.”
Companies industry wide have adopted blade servers including most recently Web hosts Cirrus Tech (www.cirrushosting.com) which has installed new Dell (www.dell.com) blade servers in the preparation for hosted offerings including Hosted Exchange and SharePoint Services.
Companies picking up on this hardware trend also include Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com), which expanded its systems portfolio Tuesday with the addition of a new enterprise storage blade and two new server modules including the Sun Blade 6000 disk module, Sun’s first Open Storage blade, which offers up to 1.2 TB of storage capacity.
