IBM To deliver entry level $2,000 Server Blades

By Bernard Cole
iApplianceWeb
(10/01/02, 01:11:20 AM EDT)

IBM Corp. is scheduled within a month or so to begin shipping server blades --- single board computers with full server capabilities --- at an entry price, roughly $2,000, for a dual Xeon-based configuration. This will bring the advantages of server blades, such as fine grained system scalability, to well within the range of many low end commodity server applications in small businesses and organizations.

Called BladeCenters, the new small form factor servers are designed by IBM's eServer group to support Linux, Microsoft Windows or Novell Unix operating systems.

The company believes it has overcome the price and power dissipation roadblocks that have prevented other efforts from succeeding, 25 percent lower in price than comparable HP designs and with much more managable power profiles.

Minimul configuration BladeCenter server blades will begin shipping next month for $1,879, while a more functionally richer version with a 2GHz Intel Xeon processor, 512 Mbytes of DDR memory, a 40-Gbyte ATA disk drive and two Gigabit Ethernet connections will be priced at $2,178.

The company said the design calls for the BladeCenters to be twice as dense as a standard 1U server. Also, systems have been designed so that as many as 84 BladeCenter servers can fit in a single rack.