IBM Ups The Ante in Server Blade Data Centers

San Mateo, Ca. -- Unlike competitors Hewlett Packard and Sun, IBM Corp. has upped the ante in server blade-based internet data centers with a solution that almost twich as dense as other alternatives.

By emphasizing more and faster processors, memory and communications options into its design, IBM hopes to carve out a position at the high end of the market. IBM's BladeCenter design will pack up to 168 Intel Xeon processors running at 2 GHz and faster into a full rack, initially tying the blades together with Gigabit Ethernet. Some competing designs have used fewer than 100 processors and 100-Mbit Ethernet as an interconnect.

BladeCenter also offers as options for each blade dual IDE hard-disk drives and built-in support for internal or external 2-Gbit/second Fibre Channel switches. Many other systems use a single drive per blade and do not offer Fibre Channel, an increasingly popular interconnect for storage networks.

Server blades are essentially PC servers on an adapter card that can be slotted into a chassis; they are aimed at data centers requiring very dense system configurations. Hewlett-Packard and a handful of startups have generally focused on low-power, entry-level server blades to date, aiming at so-called first-tier or Web server jobs, often using lower power Pentium III or Transmeta Crusoe processors.

With its BladeCenter roll out, IBM is leveraging its big systems heritage, aiming at so-called second-tier or applications servers. The IBM launch could mark a further shift away from Transmeta Corp. or other notebook-class processors used in the first wave of blades designs by pioneers such as startup RLX Technologies Inc.