Intel Takes Wraps Off New Blade Server Offering

Formerly code-named Hampton, the Intel Enterprise Blade Server was formally introduced at the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, Calif. The offering is the culmination of a unique technology-sharing agreement between Intel and IBM aimed at bringing blade technology to the larger OEM and white-box markets.

"There are going to be a lot of very unique value propositions from our blade platform," said Patrick Buddenbaum, product line manager for Intel's enterprise platforms and services marketing. "We anticipate these blades can be an opportunity to gain market-segment share."

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker will offer various features of the Enterprise Blade Server separately to the custom systems and OEM channels. Individually, Intel has priced the blade chassis--which includes a 2x power supply and midplane--at $2,800; a Gigabit Ethernet switch at $1,875; a Fibre Channel switch at $9,500; and a dual-processor compute blade at $995.

By Friday, Intel said it will begin taking orders from OEMs and custom system builders for the blade offerings pertaining to dual-processor systems.

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Configured with Intel's components, such a blade server solution could be built with 14, two-processor blade servers in a 7U chassis.

Intel has also reached agreement with software vendor Veritas, which will make available an Intel Development Manager powered by Veritas OpForce provisioning software (see story). The software will enable solution providers to roll applications, operating systems or BIOS updates throughout a blade system.

At least six system builders--including Promicro, Bull and Lenovo--were expected to jointly announce products based on the Intel blade offering, with 15 additional OEMs expected to ship products with the blade technology by year's end, Intel executives said.