News

posted on 30 June 2008 09:36

Blade Network Technologies is supplying hybrid 1/10Gbit/s Ethernet switches for IBM's BladeCenter and also joining The Green Grid and Climate Savers Computing Initiative, capitalizing on the low power-draw of its switches.

Blade states that its new green blade switch provides 50 percent greater bandwidth and up to 50% better energy efficiency and, priced at $4,999, is up to 50% less expensive than comparable Cisco blade switches. The switch includes VMReady network virtualization capabilities and Extensions to IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager for extensive I/O virtualization capabilities.

The new switch provides the ability to use six 1-Gigabit copper and three 10-Gigabit SFP+ fiber uplinks concurrently – for 50 percent more bandwidth than alternative blade switch offerings. It features layer 2/3 support for advanced features such as Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) built-in at no additional cost. It delivers 104 Gbit/s full-duplex throughput to the IBM BladeCenter enclosure.

The switch can support, Blade says, Fibre Channel over Ethernet access to storage now with loss-less and fast latency attributes.

Alex Yost, IBM Vice President and Business Line Executive for IBM BladeCenter. ““IBM continues to foster an ecosystem of industry-leading products around BladeCenter, and now we’ll add Blade's new 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet switch ... With its combination of 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit uplinks, (it) provides our customers with strong investment protection and a clear migration path as they transition to 10 Gigabit Ethernet.”

Blade is marketing its three Ps - price/performance/power - under the Rackonomics rubric with market leader Cisco firmly in its sights. It says that Switches account for about 10% of total data center power usage. Customers are looking at the rack as a unit. A small difference between alternative server vendors becomes more important in assessing the power requirements of the entire rack. It reckons that itss 6 watts per 10GE port vs.Cisco's 75 watts per 10GE chassis switch port becomes a big deal when scaling out massive, mega data centers.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}