IBM has introduced a line of blade servers so compact that 84 of
the devices - built around Intel - Xeon processors, can fit in a
standard server rack.
Tom Bradicich, chief technology officer for IBM's xSeries servers,
said the design of the new blades will serve as a road map for the
design of future products that IBM and Intel plan to develop
jointly under an agreement announced last week.
Pricing for the IBM eServer BladeCenter starts at $1,879 (£1,207),
with the chassis designed to hold the blades priced at $4,988
(£3,203). Each chassis holds 14 blades - each of them essentially a
server on a card - and a standard rack can hold six of the chassis.
Each server comes with up to 8Gb of memory, Bradicich said, and two
internal hard drives. Users can choose optional fibre switches and
a Fibre Channel architecture for a faster I/O.
Bradicich said IBM would start shipping the new blades in November.
In a related development, Hewlett-Packard, which introduced its
blade server line last year, said its blade shipments have now
passed 1,800 units per month.
"The blade server market is taking off like a rocket, and it's only
the most agile and innovative vendors that can take advantage of
this opportunity," said James Mouton, HP's vice president of
enterprise servers.
Market research firm IDC said sales in the new blade server
category would total only $120m (£77m) this year but will grow to
$3.7bn (£2.4bn) in 2006.