IBM will set an industry standard for server performance with the
blades it will begin shipping in the third quarter of this
year.
The hyper-dense blade designs already on the market from IBM rivals
lack the power to perform in an application or database
environment, Tim Dougherty, director of server blades at IBM,
said.
The company's server blade hardware and software architecture,
dubbed IBM eServer BladeCenter, will be made up of
high-performance, two-way server modules running Intel's Xeon MP
processors as well as IBM's own Power chips, Dougherty said.
"Our vision is a vision of server blades that don't force customers
to sacrifice performance and reliability in order to jam as many
servers into a rack as they can," Dougherty said. "We want to offer
a high-performance blades system and prevent this kind of
ill-advised trade-off between footprint and performance."
Early blade offerings from startups such as RLX and Racemi were
predominately targeted at simple, appliance-like, front-end Web
server tasks.
More recent server blade offerings from Hewlett-Packard and Compaq
appeared with roadmaps that add processor power to the blades and
evolve them into the application and datacentre layers.
But IBM plans to start at the high-performance level with
BladeCenter, Dougherty said. The first BladeCenter products will be
dual-processor servers which will fit 84-to-a-rack and incorporate
gigabit Ethernet as an I/O backplane for each of the server blades,
he said.
Making it possible to build a complete network from IBM's
BladeCenter, the company will offer a combination of server blades,
IBM TotalStorage blades, and a variety of networking blades.
IBM Director software will provide the management tools for
BladeCenter and will include elements of IBM's task automation and
self-healing technologies such as eLiza and Project Oceano,
according to IBM.
IBM will also spearhead a BladeCenter Alliance Program that will
foster interoperability between BladeCenter and products from
Broadcom, D-Link, Intel, Microsoft, Nortel, QLogic, and IBM's own
Lotus and WebSphere products.