New Blade Servers Forged for Harsh Climes

Eying more market share in the telecommunications industry, IBM unveiled a blade server system Thursday, one designed to withstand harsh environmental conditions.

The eServer BladeCenter T is the Armonk, N.Y. company’s latest member
of the
company’s blade server family. Blade servers are
thin
machines that fit into a chassis. More blades may be added as required
to
boost computing power on a network. If one fails, another kicks in to
replace it so the tasks don’t suffer downtime.

According to IBM, BladeCenter is certified for Network
Equipment Building System 3 (NEBS 3) and European Telecommunications
Standard Industry (ETSI) certified, which are guidelines for products
that
can handle anything from extreme temperatures to natural disasters such
as
earthquakes and lightning strikes and fires.

Features in the blades include a Telcom Alarm Panel and air input
filtering.

IBM said it is offering the BladeCenter T, which fits into 600mm
tracks,
beginning June 25 at $7,797 for the base chassis. Customers may then
add as
many as eight 2-way Intel Xeon blades for $2629 each per chassis, putting a
fully loaded BladeCenter T $28,827.

HP and Sun Microsystems also offer
NEBS-certified blade servers, which are tailored for wireless and
telecommunications applications that require always-on availability.

Though blade server systems have been on the table from IBM, HP, Sun
Microsystems and a handful of smaller vendors like RLX Technologies and
Egenera for a few years, the public had been slow to snap them up
because of
concerns about performance power and interconnect technologies.

Common architecture standards for blades remain a barrier to
adoption. In order to address the issue, Intel, Dell, IBM and Hewlett-Packard forged the Server Management Working Group last December
under the aegis of the Distributed Management Task Force .

As vendors have largely addressed or made progress on these
problems, blades have been gaining in popularity, and not only because they conserve
power,
slide in and out of a chassis easily and cut costs by replacing large
servers in certain scenarios.

IBM and its rivals envision the ability to cluster blades for maximum
performance. InfiniBand solution providers such as
TopSpin have added virtualization capabilities
for
blades to help vendors maximize their hardware and lure more customers
to
the table.