Computing giants IBM and Intel have announced a partnership that
will see the two companies producing blade servers together.
IBM and Intel will share technology and development costs across
every part of the blade server designs, including the server
hardware itself, the chassis, networking and management tools.
IBM's contributions will centre on planning the system architecture
and management software, while Intel will add in its processor,
chipset and server board knowledge.
With their combined computing muscle, the companies could set
standards in the young blade server space and challenge market
leaders like Hewlett-Packard and RLX Technologies, according to one
industry analyst.
"This is basically an intention between the two of them to come up
with mutual standards for the blade form factor, chassis and
network infrastructure," said David Freund, a server technologies
analyst at Illuminata. "One of the ramifications of that is that
with the market size these two companies both command, especially
with them working in concert, the likelihood of such standards then
becoming standards in the marketplace is very real," he said.
Hardware makers have turned to blade servers as a way to give their
customers the most computing power possible in the least amount of
space. The servers themselves are stripped down to only the
essential components so that they can be tightly stacked in a
chassis. The servers share networking and power connections through
the backplane of the chassis, which cuts down on management
headaches for administrators.
IBM has lagged behind some of its competitors with blade technology
and sees the deal with Intel as a way to speed up its product
rollout.
"This work with Intel will accelerate what we are able to do,
especially as we go forward," said Tim Dougherty, director of IBM's
blade server strategy.
IBM has already been working on its own blade products and will
release a system in the third quarter based on the 2.4GHz Xeon chip
from Intel. While this first system is largely based on IBM's own
technology, future servers will be launched more frequently as a
result of the partnership, Dougherty said.
Intel already supplies chips to a wide variety of blade vendors,
including RLX and HP, but the company said it saw the potential for
a union with IBM based on the two companies' vision of the
applications that will run on blades. "From an Intel perspective,
we looked at the emerging category of blade servers and what was
interesting to us was that the new applications and deployment of
blade servers are in the mid-tier of the enterprise," said Phil
Brace, marketing director in Intel's enterprise systems and
platforms group.
Both companies expect blade servers to handle applications such as
Microsoft's Exchange and some e-business software from the SAP.
Like IBM, HP decided to go with more powerful processors for its
blade systems to help make the servers more suited for running
demanding e-business software. However, packing faster, and
consequently hotter, chips limits how tightly blades can be crammed
together.
RLX has picked lower power processors from both Intel and Transmeta
to let it make some of the densest blade server designs around. RLX
systems have attracted customers in the scientific and technical
computing areas where lots of processing power in a small space is
appreciated.
The partnership between IBM and Intel could erode some of the
differentiation among blade server vendors, Illuminata's Freund
said. By partnering with Intel, IBM is sending a signal that it
wants to sell lots of blades and sell them cheap.
"This deal begs the question of why IBM would help drive the
commoditisation of this fledgling market," Freund said.
"Apparently, the answer is that IBM decided that such a
commoditisation is not only inevitable but also desirable."
If blade servers are similar in price to current thin rack servers,
hardware makers will find it difficult to differentiate themselves
with system design only. The biggest selling point for the vendors
will be the quality of their management software, Freund
said.
"With this kind of commoditisation, the differentiator for the
vendors will focus on their management software and how well it
handles things like application deployment and optimisation," he
said.
IBM plans to build its own management software for its blade
systems and sees this area as one way to separate itself from the
herd.