IBM Bolsters Blade Strategy

ST. REGIS HOTEL, New York -- IBM today took the wraps off new devices powered by AMD's next-generation chip, which it hopes will drive blade technology further into the enterprise market. (See IBM Delivers Computing Systems.)

"A few years ago it was the early innovators that were embracing this technology," said Susan Whitney, the general manager of the IBM Systems and Technology Group, at a press event this morning, adding that the technology was typically found in the likes of university campuses and the U.S. Defense Department.

Now, however, IBM claims to have 40,000 blade servers deployed on Wall Street alone, and Whitney says that the technology is getting attention from the likes of the IPTV sector and from security specialists looking to run visual recognition applications like iris scanning and fingerprint recognition in biometrics.

The vendor unveiled two new blades, the LS41, a device that can be upgraded from two- to four-way serving, targeted at database applications and high performance computing (HPC) clusters; and the two-way LS21, which is being pushed toward the financial sector.

AMD has yet to reveal the specifics on the Opteron Rev F chip that the blades use; the chips are expected to be more widely commercially available later this year. The processor is expected to offer as much as a 20 percent speed boost on the current 2.6 GHz Opteron, as well as improved virtualization features.Other enhancements within the new blades include Xcelerated Memory, which IBM claims can offer a 15 percent performance boost in memory access compared to its competitors.

Although IBM will not be announcing the pricing and availability for the new servers until the third quarter of this year, users are keen to get their hands on the technology. "It's the speed," explained Vincent Stephens, vice president of technology operations at real estate service Move.com, which is planning to upgrade from current IBM LS20 blades to the new LS21s.

The exec, who has over 220 blade servers in his Phoenix, Ariz., datacenter, feels that the new blades will improve his virtualization story. "We're a big VMware shop so we leverage the CPU and the memory as much as we can," he said.

With the LS20s, Move.com can run about five virtual machines on each physical server although Stephens expects to push this number up to seven virtual machines by deploying the LS21s.

Nathan Sykes, computational fluid dynamics manager at Milton Keynes, U.K.-based motor racing team Red Bull Racing, told Byte and Switch that he may consider the LS21 at some point in the future. "If you look at the amount [of servers] that you can put into a rack it's a great product."But despite the ability to fit 14 blade servers into a standard IBM BladeCenter chassis, Sykes has opted against a blade deployment, at least for the time being. Instead, he will deploy a Rev F-based rack-mounted System x3455 server, which was also unveiled by IBM today.

"It was a very close decision," explained Sykes. "If I was looking for something that I knew would be 100 percent number crunching, then the number one choice would be a blade." Instead, the x3455's low latency features won out over the blade's compute power, he added.

Despite the blade hype in recent years, not all users have been wowed by the technology. (See NewEnergy Chops Its Blades.) A number of firms have already voiced their discontent with blades, citing the technology as both costly and immature. (See Study Highlights Blade Disappointment and Are Blades Cutting It?.)

IBM, despite dominating the blade market, has seen its main rival HP crank up its own blade strategy in the last few weeks; Sun also re-entered the space recently. (See HP Brandishes Blades, HP Unveils Blade Design, Ofcom Offers New Spectrum , and Sun Glints Off Blades.)

But interoperability remains a hurdle. At the moment, users still can't swap out blades from different vendors within the same chassis, thanks to vendors' reliance on their own blade architectures. IBM's approach to this problem, which it reiterated today, is its blade.org initiative, which aims to tie as many technology partners as possible into its blade architecture. Bill Zeitler, senior vice president of IBM's Systems and Technology Group explained that there are now around 80 members of the group.On one of the hottest days of the year in New York, IBM also gave a sneak preview of its Thermal Diagnostics technology to help keep data centers cool. The vendor has developed software that draws information from sensors dotted around a data center, pinpointing "hotspots," and enabling users to tackle problems, such as an air conditioner failure, before they flare up.

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch