Intel and IBM connect blades

Intel and IBM are sharing development costs as they work on standards to improve the interoperability of blade servers

The prospects for modular rack-mounted blade servers have improved following the announcement by IBM and Intel that they will work together on blade technology. The two companies will share the development costs of blade products. IBM is to focus on the system architecture and management software, while Intel will work on hardware components.

The pair aim to establish a set of de facto industry standards as blade servers grow in popularity. "We are developing a common infrastructure," said Alan Priestley, strategic marketing manager for Intel's Enterprise Marketing Group. "The aim is to standardise the interfaces in order to improve the integration and interoperability of blade servers from different suppliers."

The interconnect standards that he predicts will play a major role in future blade technology include PCI Express for intra-blade operations, and InfiniBand for inter-blade and backplane communications.

Shared resources

For its part, IBM is developing a systems management environment in which multiple blades can operate. "There are a wide range of management tasks, particularly in managing the shared resources and systems redundancy capabilities available," commented Tony John, IBM eServer brand manager for Northern Europe.

"These management tools are part of the IBM Director suite, (which we already license to third-party manufacturers)," John added. IBM seems to have learned from past criticisms of its products locking in customers to proprietary systems, and now hopes its Director software will be resold by other blade server vendors.

If the companies succeed in developing standards for integration, it could mean that blade systems will create a new market for servers as commodity items.

Under their agreement IBM will produce its own range of branded servers, but it will not restrict Intel from selling blade technology to other manufacturers. Priestley added, "Intel does not (sell) its own brand of system, but it sells boards and modules to other vendors. They then add value to the systems and brand them as their own."

IBM can be confident that it will gain custom because there will be a new market for management software - particularly if dual-processor blade servers are deployed as mid-tier server systems.

Power consumption

"To date, blade-format servers have used low-power (consumption) processors such as the Transmeta Crusoe and Intel Pentium," Priestley said. "These are designed primarily for mobile applications and are limited in terms of performance, but they have allowed for high node density. Our plan now is to bring performance blade systems to the market using the (higher power consumption) Xeon processor. They won't have the node density of current blade systems, but they will bring high performance to the blade marketplace."

Most observers agree that management tools will be critical for blade installations. John said, "The Director software will make deployment much easier, supporting multiple servers with multiple operating systems in the same managed environment."

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