IBM Adds Fibre Channel To Blade ServersIBM Adds Fibre Channel To Blade Servers

IBM on Wednesday introduced a number of iterative improvements to its eServer BladeCenter in a move designed to gain wider acceptance of the nascent technology. IBM, which says it has shipped 5,000 BladeCenter server blades since the product debuted late last year, is now shipping blade servers with integrated Fibre Channel connectivity that will let blade customers tie their servers directly into storage area networks.

IBM's ultimate goal is to remove even local hard drives from its server blades and have all blade-server storage placed on a SAN, says Timothy Dougherty, director of the company's blade-server strategy. Fewer moving parts on the server lowers the cost and reduces the likelihood of component failure.

IBM, which competes in the blade-server market with a number of smaller vendors as well as old rivals Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and, most recently, Sun Microsystems, also has established a road map for BladeCenter. Within the next few weeks, IBM will unveil a partnership with a network component provider that gives its blade servers Layer 4 and higher integrated switches for more sophisticated network traffic routing.

By year's end, IBM plans to ship blade servers with four Intel-based processors per blade, doubling the density and size of its current blades. During that time frame, IBM also plans to introduce high-performance computing blades that use the company's 64-bit Power processors. The Power-processor blade servers will run IBM's AIX Unix operating system and will likely be priced at about half the cost of a comparable 64-bit rack-mounted server, or about $6,000. IBM also will offer Intel Itanium-based blades within the coming year.

IBM expects to make key enhancements to its Director blade-management software, including adding tools that let users shift workloads dynamically across blades and integrated VMware Inc. server virtualization software, which can be used to segment individual blades into even smaller servers. "We're seeing a confluence of things here," Dougherty says. "Customers are saying, 'we have to save money.'"