NETWORKS

Bell Microproducts and BLADE Network Technologies (BLADE) announced today that Bell Microproducts (Bell Micro) will distribute BLADE's 10 Gigabit Ethernet RackSwitch product family in North America.

According to a recent report by Dell'Oro Group, 10 Gigabit Ethernet in the data center is a "bright spot" in the Ethernet switch market, with significant new product introductions helping to propel 10 Gigabit Ethernet growth as those products begin to ramp in 2009.

"In today's challenging economy, 10 Gigabit Ethernet data center networking remains a strong and growing segment," said Gary Gammon, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Marketing, Bell Micro. "We are delighted to team up with BLADE as a trusted provider of 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions for high performance computing clusters, IP storage, IPTV and Web 2.0 applications. BLADE's RackSwitch products are best-of-breed top-of-rack switches that deliver the high bandwidth and low latency essential to today's consolidated and virtualized data centers. The addition of BLADE's solutions to our line card is indicative of our ongoing commitment to offer industry-leading solutions to our customers."

BLADE and Bell Micro are partnering to deliver 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions, such as IP SANs for scalable storage performance, single-wire networks that converge networking and storage, environments tuned for Video on Demand (VoD) and streaming broadcast environments, as well as any data center environment that requires cloud computing or HPC-class performance. The two companies will also pursue opportunities for server and storage consolidation, data center virtualization and green IT.

"We are very pleased that Bell Micro has teamed up with BLADE to address the strong demand for 10 Gigabit Ethernet in the data center and promote adoption of our RackSwitch products," said Shailesh Naik, Vice President of Sales, BLADE Network Technologies. "Bell Micro and BLADE will work together to ensure that solution providers understand the total cost of ownership advantages of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and how best to harness the 'Virtual, Cooler and Easier' capabilities of our RackSwitch family for demanding data center networks."

BLADE also announced today its new RackSwitch Solution Partner Program. Bell Micro will distribute BLADE's RackSwitch products to solution providers that join BLADE's new channel program. Solution providers can apply to become a RackSwitch Authorized or Champion Partner at www.bladenetwork.net/reseller.

"BLADE's RackSwitch products are ideal for our financial infrastructure solutions that rely on advanced network topologies to increase network throughout while decreasing latency," said Anthony Lobretto, President, Hailer IT Solutions, an innovative technology solutions provider to businesses in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area. "Our objective is to build extremely low-latency, highly resilient networks without overcomplicating our designs, which is exactly what BLADE's RackSwitch high-performance switches are designed to deliver."

BLADE's Data Center Networking Advantages

BLADE's "Virtual, Cooler, Easier" 1-10 Gigabit Ethernet RackSwitch networking solutions for data center environments add network intelligence to blade and top-of-rack servers, while enhancing performance and providing high availability, scalability, manageability and security to the data center environment. Customers who add BLADE switches to their infrastructure will realize significant reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) for their data center infrastructure.

RackSwitch products from BLADE take a breakthrough approach known as "Rackonomics" to reduce the total cost of ownership of data center infrastructures, overcome network overload and enable scale-out data center economies. Data center architects can standardize on a unified and affordable rack-level network infrastructure to provision and scale out Web 2.0 environments, high-performance clusters and virtualized data centers.