INDUSTRY

IBM today announced the expansion of its BladeCenter ecosystem and said companies including CipherOptics, Cisco, Nominum, QLogic and SANRAD will introduce new blades and solutions for IBM eServer BladeCenter. This expanding ecosystem is helping IBM quickly address customer needs with new products based on the open specification of BladeCenter supercomputing. BladeCenter has been the leading blade server in supercomputing for seven successive quarters. IBM has shipped well in excess of 200,000 blades since market introduction, the first and only vendor to reach that milestone. Since IBM and Intel opened the BladeCenter specification in September, more than 260 companies have secured the BladeCenter specification. Further, more than 350 technology and solution partners are part of the BladeCenter Alliance Program. Today's expansion includes: -- Industry leaders IBM and Cisco are collaborating with the intent to deliver an Open Standards based 'End to End' iSCSI solution for BladeCenter. This solution will incorporate Quality of Service and security features and will utilize Cisco's data and storage networking intelligence to connect BladeCenter to iSCSI or Fibre Channel storage devices. IBM and Cisco have defined two reference architectures to support a variety of workloads, one for web, file or print serving and the other for transaction processing. Together, IBM and Cisco intend to deliver a high performing, robust, resilient and secure iSCSI environment that allows customers to extend their existing TCP/IP and Ethernet investments to the Storage Area Network. -- QLogic Corp., a leading provider of iSCSI host bus adapters (HBA) and member of the BladeCenter Alliance Program, announced today it would provide its QLogic iSCSI expansion card for BladeCenter. The iSCSI adapter is powered by a single-chip TCP/IP and iSCSI offload engine designed to deliver user-friendly, high performance storage networking while preserving CPU resources. "IBM is advancing the blade industry, creating business opportunities for partner companies while broadening the BladeCenter ecosystem to offer greater choice to our clients," said Doug Balog, vice president and business line executive for IBM eServer BladeCenter. "Strategic relationships with our partners increase the value proposition of BladeCenter, making it ideally suited to serve as the foundation of any on demand business. The success of the BladeCenter Alliance and Open Specification programs proves the BladeCenter brand is becoming synonymous with blade technology." New Open Specification blades In addition, several companies are announcing new blades built to the BladeCenter open specification. SANRAD, the leader in intelligent IP storage networking, announced today that it has developed a new storage switch for BladeCenter based on the open specification. "SANRAD is very excited that IBM's eServer BladeCenter has opened their platform specifications to companies like SANRAD," said Uli Gal-oz, president and CEO, SANRAD. "SANRAD intends to offer our intelligent V-Switch for BladeCenter customers. By combining the BladeCenter Ethernet infrastructure with our V-Switch, customers can deploy a very dynamic and reliable iSCSI storage solution, delivering exceptional performance and high business continuance." CipherOptics, a leading innovator of multi-gigabit-speed Internet protocol security (IPsec) encryption technology used to secure data in motion, has announced today that it will develop an IPsec encryption blade for IBM BladeCenter. The initial CipherOptics BladeCenter solution will support data encryption speeds of up to 1.9 gigabits at wire speed, with virtually no latency and completely transparent to the network. With this solution IBM customers can now protect their data with little or no impact on their applications. "Given the growing number of data security breaches that have resulted in compromised credit card numbers and social security information, the importance of protecting sensitive data, both 'at rest' and 'in transit', has taken on a new sense of urgency," said Ron Willis, president and CEO of CipherOptics, Inc. "This is part of CipherOptics' strategy for end-to-end data protection and allows IBM customers, including financial institutions, government agencies, and global enterprises, to quickly and easily add deterministic capabilities to encrypt different types of sensitive information while in motion within their BladeCenter environment. The CipherOptics blade will provide the ability to select the sensitive data that needs to be protected with rich encryption technology as it moves over an IP network, between sites, within a campus, and throughout a global network infrastructure." Nominum, a leading provider of IP address infrastructure solutions, announced today it will deliver a new blade offering that combines its carrier grade DNS and DHCP solutions with BladeCenter to meet customers' growing network demands. The new, scalable solution will enable server consolidation and is designed for telecommunications companies and service providers. "At Nominum we work with technology providers that provide solutions for always-on networks and the IBM eServer BladeCenter offers a unique platform for high performance and scalability requirements," said Chris Risley, chief executive officer of Nominum. "The combination of Nominum's Foundation product family with the BladeCenter platform creates an ideal pairing for telecommunications and internet services providers that expect more from their DNS infrastructure." More information about BladeCenter is available at www.ibm.com/eserver/bladecenter.