IBM has signed up 115 companies since early September to
develop for its eServer BladeCenter open specification it
co-authored with Intel.
Many of those companies specialise in building networking
switches, adapter cards, and appliance and communications blades,
all aimed at enterprise-class networks, IBM executives said.
"With the first 115 companies, we are seeing a lot of networking
kinds of functionality being explored as well as for XML
acceleration and encryption-decryption. Companies that would
ordinarily have created a solution for an appliance are now doing
them for blades," said Tim Dougherty, director of marketing for
IBM's of eServer BladeCenter.
One such company, Emulex, is building a Fibre Channel HBA that
promises to offer higher performance San connectivity for IBM's
BladeCenter. The company hopes to make the product available before
the end of next year's first quarter.
"We see their [IBM-Intel] decision to open up the specification
as a way to help us satisfy a growing demand among our users for
HBAs within a BladeCenter environment," said Mike Smith, executive
vice-president of marketing for Emulex.
Two other companies with development projects under way include
Ranch Networks, which is creating a network control option blade
that allows IP telephony service providers to better control
security and QoS, and Tarari, which creates specialised silicon for
content processing with an emphasis on accelerating XML
processing.
The IBM-Intel specification offers free access to the design
specifications for corporate and third-party developers in order to
build products that are complementary to IBM's BladeCenter series
servers that then offer a range of different solutions.
Some industry observers said they were impressed with IBM's
progress, which, at least so far, validates the company's open
approach to selling its blade architecture.
"This [open specification] is an interesting way to go about
driving visibility around an emerging form factor. Blades will
never be standardised across suppliers, but this openness within
the architecture is important for users. Users do not want to put a
Dell blade in an IBM chassis because of support issues, but they
will want to know that Cisco or Brocade switches are available
within the platform," said John Humphreys, research manager for
IDC's enterprise computing and modular server programs.
One of the fastest growing markets, IDC recently forecasted that
by 2007 blade servers will account for one out of every four
servers sold.
One recent development that will drive this sort of growth is
Dell's re-entry in the blade server market with a price competitive
line of systems. IBM's Dougherty, however, sees Dell's new
offerings as being a boon to the market in general.
"We welcome them [Dell]. We believe their entry is a major
potential shift in the industry, although I think they will have
difficulty keeping up with this sort of infrastructure. They are
really good at producing things in mass quantities at lower prices.
But this market is about integration of infrastructure, and those
are the skills IBM can bring to the table like integrating storage
and networking systems and helping users deploy them," Dougherty
said.
Analysts see Dell's entry as more beneficial to users than
individual suppliers and their respective strategies.
"IBM and Dell will overlap in terms of their target marketplace,
but that just means that both companies will have to stay sharp in
this competition. From the end-user's perspective it is a very good
thing because there will be cost competitiveness which is going to
drive down costs," Humphreys said.
Ed Scannell writes for Infoworld