IBM Rolls Out Low-Cost Blade Servers
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) has announced a low-cost blade server chassis, along with several new "business-in-a-box" packages for a wide range of industries, including the growing bioinformatics sector.
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Dell has introduced a new line of blade servers, the PowerEdge 1855 series, equipped with dual Xeon processors. The computer maker says its blades take up less space, cost less and are more economical to operate than traditional servers.
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The City of Burbank migrated to new IBM (NYSE: IBM) BladeCenter servers, improving data center performance by 30 percent and, as a result, reduced IT costs dramatically.
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Just as some analysts believe the market for blade servers is about to heat up, Dell (Quote, Chart) moved forward with its most significant modular server, unveiling the PowerEdge 1855 for powerful computing at a lower cost.
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IBM has introduced three new POWER5 processor-based servers that the company says outpace Sun and HP in performance records and establish a new standard for server virtualization capabilities.
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Big Blue's $18,995 QS20 Cell blade servers are geared for encryption, medical imaging and seismic research.
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Dell is back in the blade server ring with the introduction of its PowerEdge 1855 blade servers. The company is hoping to prove to customers that its new blades have significant cost savings and performance
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IBM on Friday unveiled its lowest-priced-ever BladeCenter chassis and a series of ready-to-go solutions, dubbed &quot;business-in-a-box&quot; to push blades deeper into small- and mid-sized businesses (SMB).
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Corp. is adding to its blade server line with an upcoming model targeted at small-to-medium-sized businesses. The BladeCenter S system is packaged to include server, storage, input-output connections to a network and software integrated into a single chassis. IBM declined to provide pricing information but said it plans to begin shipping the product in the fourth quarter. "BladeCenter S simplifies IT for our customers," said Alex Yost, vice president and business line executive for IBM's blade products. "Set up is three easy steps: Take it out of the box, plug it in and run the wizard to get it up and running, much like you might do a PC today." The new model is small enough to sit on a desktop, runs on standard 110- or 220-volt electrical current, requires no raised floor, and features simplified cabling compared to other servers, said Yost. A BladeCenter S system can include up to six blade servers and will include software for running a typical office environment, such as antivirus protection, VOIP (Voice over IP) phone service, e-mail and file-print functions. IBM cited an IDC research forecast showing blade computer market revenue growing to US$11 billion by 2010, from $3 billion in 2005. IDC research also forecasts blade sales to account for 18.1 percent of all server sales by 2011, from 6.6 percent this year. Blades are appealing to data center managers because they are smaller and more energy efficient than rack servers. But in the competition among server vendors for blade sales, IBM comes in second. Hewlett-Packard Co. held a 40.9 percent share of the global blade server market, while IBM held 35.2 percent, also according to IDC. HP on MondayÂ unwrapped BladeSystem bc2000 and bc2500 machines, claiming they reduce IT management costs while improving data security.
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IBM said it plans to build a blade server system for small to medium-sized businesses.
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Dell has announced a dense blade server designed for enterprises with space-tight, hard-to-cool data centres. The PowerEdge 1855 can pack as many as 10 blade servers in a 7U-sized
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Intel has developed a white-box blade server based on standardized components, instead of specialized parts usually used to produce such systems.Called Clear Bay, the server is based on the&#160;Server System Infrastructure Forum&#39;s Modular Server Specification&#160;announced last July.The Modular Server Specification lays out standards for blade servers and, where possible, aims to use off-the-shelf components for connectors, power supplies and heat sinks. The aim is to bring down the cost of blade servers -- which are denser and generally easier to manage than rack-mount systems -- and make them available to a wider range of users, including small businesses.Clear Bay is based on a 6U-high blade chassis that can support up to six two-way server nodes running dual-core or quad-core Xeon processors, 14 hard-disk drives, two storage-control modules, a management module and two Ethernet switch modules. The platform includes Intel&#39;s Multi-Flex Technology, a set of management and storage technologies. Among the technologies included are virtual storage mapping, integrated storage-area network, diagnostics, and single sign-on, among others.Officially known as Intel Modular Server Products, the Clear Bay platform is intended to be assembled and sold by local manufacturers instead of top server vendors like IBM or Hewlett-Packard.Pricing for servers based on the Clear Bay platform was not immediately available. But Intel expects pricing for Clear Bay servers to be roughly similar to rack-mount servers based on the same processor and configuration.&#160;
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International Business Machines Corp.  IBM.N said it is making the design of its "blade" computer  servers widely available, in a move designed to gain wider  acceptability in data centers and the telecommunications  industry.
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IBM has introduced two new Unix-based servers aimed at small- to mid-size businesses. Based on the Power5 microprocessor, the new servers join IBM&#39;s On Demand Express product line, and are priced starting at $3,993.
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Continuing its steady push to win over the hearts and wallets of midsize companies, IBM on Tuesday is rolling out two lower-priced Unix-based servers that will go head-to-head with offerings from archrivals Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM announced an upgraded version of itsÂ blade server based on the Cell processorÂ on Wednesday, adding memory and data throughput for better performance on high-end applications, such as graphics and finance. IBM also shaved the size of the server so users can fit 14 of the new IBM BladeCenter QS21s into each chassis, compared to seven units of its predecessor, the QS20. The new version can also function in a diverse blade environment, working alongside computers based on the x86 or PowerPC chip architecture to assign workloads to the most efficient platform, said Paula Richards, product line manager for Cell systems at IBM. "We're seeing many applications where users want to actually marry a quad-core Intel or AMD blade with a Cell blade, so they can use the standard blade for basic workloads, then push their mission-critical, exotic applications off to the Cell platform," Richards said. IBM will begin selling the QS21 in October to users in industries that need to run visual computing tasks, such as 3D rendering, and time-critical jobs like compression and encryption.Â The system relies on the Cell Broadband Engine processor, created for Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation 3 gaming system by the consortium of IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The QS21 features two 3.2 GHz Cell processors, dual Gigabit Ethernet networking, and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5.1 OS. At its maximum density in high-performance computing clusters, the system can run as fast as 6.4 TFLOPS (tera floating point operations per second) in a BladeCenter H chassis, or 25.8 TFLOPS in a 42U rack. "We're not trying to be a general purpose platform here. If you want to run your monthly statements or ERP, that's not what this is about," said Richards. "This is for time-critical, highly intense workloads like financial applications, digital video surveillance, medical imaging, or even digital media and entertainment. Jobs where time is money." The product will supplement IBM's lineup of blade servers, which also includes products running on IBM's PowerPC chips, Intel's Xeon or Core 2 Duo chips, andÂ AMD's Opteron processor. By upgrading the performance of the Cell version of the BladeCenter, IBM will be able to reach more corners of the highly specialized field of high-performance computing, one analyst said. Users buy the Xeon and Opteron BladeCenters for general purpose computing, the PowerPC BladeCenter for jobs in a Unix environment, and the Cell BladeCenter for compute-intensive applications like signal processing and image analysis, including designs from Mercury Computer Systems, a military and aerospace industry contractor, said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight 64. "They all do different things, so this is a technology update instead of a big change in positioning," Brookwood said. In concert with the QS21, IBM announced version 3.0 of its SDK for Multicore Acceleration, designed to streamline the process of application development for the new platform. IBM will launch the SDK for Multicore Acceleration on October 19, and launch the QS21 on October 26.
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IBM last Friday announced that it will release a low-price disk server aimed at midsize companies that want to establish storage area networks.