IBM Reports SuccessfulBlade Server Data Center Integration

IBM (www.ibm.com) today announced the early success of opening the IBM eServer® BladeCenter(TM) specification and new models packed with technology breakthroughs to further extend the system's enterprise capabilities.

"It is exciting to see how far BladeCenter has evolved since its introduction as a unique, well-designed architecture two years ago," said Jeff Benck, vice president, IBM eServer BladeCenter.

Forty-nine companies have received the BladeCenter open specification since Intel and IBM's joint announcement on September 2. The open specification grants free and open access to the design specifications for developers and partners of BladeCenter. In the first month of opening the specifications, IBM quadrupled the number of partners who have received the BladeCenter specifications in the last two years.

In a design breakthrough, IBM is now providing the capability of adding two small form-factor SCSI drives internally to the five new HS20 models of BladeCenter systems based on the 2.8 GHz to 3.6 GHz Intel Xeon-processor with 64 bit extensions.

This allows the BladeCenter chassis to fit 14 SCSI-based blades far exceeding the density any other such offering in the marketplace. As a result, the new SCSI drives can provide up to 85 percent more speed and up to 83 percent more capacity than the prior IDE drives.

Applications that can take advantage of SIMD include bioinformatics and proteomics in the life sciences industry as well as seismic, digital imaging, and financial services applications.

IBM is introducing power management software, PowerExecutive(TM), the first product in a rapidly evolving roadmap focused on reducing the costs of power in the datacenter.

BladeCenter's superior density and expanded feature set are made possible by its innovative chassis architecture as well as the thermal design itself, called Calibrated Vectored Cooling(TM). As perhaps the industry's most advanced cooling architecture, Calibrated Vectored Cooling optimizes the path of cool air flow through the system.

A new module of UpdateXpress software, a powerful update/installation tool for IBM's line of servers, now provides a unified point to update and install all BladeCenter networking switches and modules as well as server components.