IBM Ships Opteron-Based Blades

The company started shipping its LS20 Opteron-based server blades, which were first discussed in April, said Tim Dougherty, director of BladeCenter marketing at Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM. The blades support either one or two single-core or dual-core AMD Opteron processors, he said.

The addition of the LS20 server blades to the IBM product line is good news to Hunt Russell, sales manager at Evolving Solutions, an IBM partner in Hamel, Minn. "Opteron is the only 64-bit processor in the x86 space," he said. "Why wouldn't you partner with AMD?"

While Russell called the Opteron-based blades a positive move for IBM, he said the real test of the success for the new servers comes down to the availability of applications from companies, including Oracle and SAP, that support the 64-bit processors. "With IBM embracing AMD, ISVs will take a new look at AMD and move faster on their applications," he said. "IBM has had Opterons in its high-end servers, but server blades is the real hot space."

IBM follows Hewlett-Packard in the AMD Opteron server blade space. HP started shipping its ProLiant BL45p with single- and dual-core Opterons in May. Late last month, the company also started selling two models with the ability to run up to two dual-core Opterons.

A Sun Microsystems spokesperson said the vendor is planning to offer Opteron-based server blades but was not able to confirm when that would happen.

IBM also has been busy building up the infrastructure around its server blades. Starting this month, the LS20, along with IBM's new e326 AMD dual-core rack-mount servers, will be able to be integrated into IBM's eCluster 1350 solutions, Dougherty said. The 1350 is primarily an Intel-based server cluster, but the company's pSeries p710 and p720 rack-mount servers also can be connected.

The ability to choose from many server options for the 1350 takes a significant part of the complexity out of building clusters, which now are often finding homes in commercial applications, especially in the oil and gas and financial spaces, he said. "It's not likely customers will mix and match [pSeries and x86-based] servers, but it's a possibility."

Big Blue also recently signed on to resell several of Veritas' storage management and clustering software applications to its customers and solution providers.

Under a four-year renewable agreement between the two vendors, IBM will offer Veritas Cluster Server, Storage Foundation, Storage Foundation for Oracle RAC and Storage Foundation for Databases as part of its portfolio of xSeries and BladeCenter solutions for Red Hat and SUSE Linux and Microsoft Windows.

Don James, CEO of Bear Data Systems, a solution provider in Belmont, Calif., said IBM's move to resell Veritas products is important for customers in primarily IBM shops, but not as significant for others. "IBM has done a good job with its support contracts and services," he said. "This move means one less phone call in the middle of the night if there's an outage."