IBM, Intel Bite into Blade Server R&D

In a little bit of quid pro quo, IBM
and Intel Tuesday agreed to manufacture blade servers together for the
enterprise marketplace.

Server blades are thin cards containing microprocessors and memory that are
designed for a dedicated application such as serving Web pages. Their appeal
lies in the fact that they may be inserted in a rack to conserve space.

While many of the blade server products on the market today focus on serving
edge applications the Armonk N.Y. firm and Santa Clara, Calif. concern said
the focus will be on designing midrange blade servers, or systems to run
e-commerce applications, firewalls, clusters and e-mail, to name a few.

Big Blue and Intel plan to cooperate on blade system and chassis
development, networking infrastructure and blade system management software.
IBM, whose future BladeCenter
upgrades will bear the fruit of its partnership with the giant
chipmaker, brings expertise in systems design, architecture and software.

In turn, Intel will offer what Phil Brace, director of Marketing for Intel’s
Enterprise Products Group, calls “server building blocks.” These include
including enterprise processors, chipsets, communications silicon, server
boards and
software. The two companies aim to make to blades that boost performance and
reliability. Brace told internetnews.com he would not rule out the
possibility of collaborating with other high-tech players on blade servers.

Giga analyst Richard Fichera applauded the deal in an e-mail to internetnews.com:

“I think this will give IBM an advantage over competitors, with the ability
to design a wider range of boards in less time,” Fichera said. “Also, there are some interesting opportunities for integrating network switching and other technology. The
issue of whether they will end up selling boards to competitors is not so
big a deal, since the majority of IBM’s customers do not buy from the same sort
of channels as Intel’s products.”

IBM already uses Intel’s DP and Itanium chips in addition to its own POWER
server semiconductors, but this deal will see Big Blue utilize Intel’s
either Intel’s Xeon processors or Xeon MP processors. Systems based on
Itanium 2 processors are also expected in the future.

IBM plans to launch its new blade server products by the end of the month.
Intel plans to deliver to its OEM customers blade servers based on the Xeon
processor family, as well as blade chassis and related management software.

The two firms are just a sampling of the major players in what is a crowded,
albeit immature market, as competitors such as Compaq, HP, Dell, Sun
Microsystems, RLX Technologies and Egenera have already brought, or plan to
bring, significant blade server contributions to the table. Market research
firm IDC estimates the serve blade market will reap about $3.7 billion by
2005.