Blade Intros RackSwitch

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- BLADE Network Technologies, Inc., the industry leader in network virtualization for servers and storage, announced its new RackSwitch family of Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, the industry's first Ethernet switches for rack-level network virtualization.

BLADE's new 1U RackSwitch product family extends virtualization by mirroring the benefits of server virtualization within the network at the rack level, saves energy through rack-friendly cooling and alleviates management pain by removing complexity through simplified management and fabric convergence.

Priced at under $500 per 10 Gigabit Ethernet port, BLADE's RackSwitch products take a breakthrough approach that is becoming known as "Rackonomics" to reduce the total cost of ownership of data center infrastructures, overcome network overload and enable scale-out data center economies. For the first time, data center architects can standardize on a unified and affordable rack-level network infrastructure to provision and scale-out Web 2.0 environments, high-performance clusters and virtualized data centers.

"A perfect storm of factors -- among them server and storage virtualization, I/O-intensive Web 2.0 applications and the move to data center consolidation using blade servers, multi-core CPUs and converged I/O fabrics -- is overloading data center networks," said Vikram Mehta, President and CEO, BLADE Network Technologies.

"Weathering this overload requires a revolutionary new set of customer-driven rules for the data center that is becoming known as 'Rackonomics.' IT departments can leverage Rackonomics to scale-out their data center networks affordably at the rack level. This comes as a welcome alternative to vendor-driven approaches that require them to scale up using inefficient, power-hungry and disjointed network topologies provisioned with large core switches that are far more expensive to deploy and operate. BLADE's RackSwitch is inspired by Rackonomics for data center networking that is 'Virtual, Cooler and Easier' so that IT departments can contain total cost of ownership, deliver greater return on investment and increase business flexibility."Blade Network Technologies Inc.