IBM Adds High-Speed Switching To Blade Servers

Beginning next month, IBM's eServer BladeCenter product will include InfiniBand-based switching from Topspin that provides up to 80 Gbps of connectivity, the companies said.

InfiniBand's server-interconnect and input/output technology creates a fabric that can be shared between multiple servers, so businesses can cluster server environments to improve resource sharing, says Stu Aaron, VP of marketing and product management for Topspin. "One of the tremendous benefits of BladeCenter is the way it allows you to consolidate elements of the enterprise, and this agreement will be extending that further," he says. With the integrated InfiniBand product, customers will not need individual LAN and SAN connections out of each BladeCenter chassis but can create a single switching center that can manage a network of blade chassis, he says.

The integrated InfiniBand connection is in response to customer demand, says Jeff Benck, VP of IBM's eServer BladeCenter organization. "We think a lot of potential customers were waiting for a solution." The co-development is in keeping with IBM's overall strategy to integrate as many elements as possible of the data center directly into the blade platform, "a strategy that definitely requires several partners," he says. IBM also offers integrated switching solutions from Brocade and Cisco for its BladeCenter products. Says Benck: "This market is getting plenty big to support multiple solutions for clients with different objectives and different preferred vendors."