IBM BladeCenter Ecosystem Swells With New Customers and Open Specification Partners

IBM BladeCenter Ecosystem Swells With New Customers and Open Specification Partners

Server Blade Summit — IBM, the leading blade vendor, announced today a new IBM eServer BladeCenter switch from McDATA and a VMware bundle designed to facilitate IBM’s continued delivery of the most highly integrated blade offering on the market. IBM’s work to deliver the most open, advanced blade offering available enables both enterprise and SMB customers to better manage their total IT infrastructure and build stronger on demand business environments.

IBM also announced that new customers have adopted BladeCenter including Siebel Systems, FusionStorm and Dean Health System.

“IBM BladeCenter is not just leading the blade market, it’s creating it. Broad customer acceptance, partner participation and industry share data show that the BladeCenter brand is becoming synonymous with blade technology,” said Jeff Benck, vice president and business line executive for IBM eServer BladeCenter. “Strategic relationships with technology providers such as McDATA and VMware increase the value proposition of BladeCenter and make it ideally suited to serve as the foundation of any on demand business.”

IBM now owns 49.5 percent of the blade server market, and grew revenue 123.2 percent year-to-year, according to IDC.* Driving this growth are new customers including:

Siebel Systems, a leading provider of business applications software, purchased BladeCenter technology in 2004, using it for development work, technical support, quality engineering and internal hosting. BladeCenter has allowed Siebel Systems to reduce its cabling by over 80 percent and cut trips to the datacenter in half. Previously, it took Siebel Systems 75 minutes to deploy 14 servers, but thanks to BladeCenter and IBM Remote Deployment Manager, it now takes just 20 minutes.

IT solution provider FusionStorm has standardized its hosting facility on IBM BladeCenter. BladeCenter has speeded the company’s deployment by as much as 100 percent, allowing FusionStorm to scale its business more rapidly and remotely manage its servers more effectively thanks to the increased reliability, density and advanced power and cooling features of BladeCenter.

IBM has seen overwhelming interest with the Open Specification and now has more than 215 partners who have signed on to receive the BladeCenter specifications to build and design their own products for the ecosystem, since IBM and Intel opened the hardware specifications for BladeCenter on September 2, 2004. Among the latest are:

Pipeline FX — which provides enterprise render farm management software to the 3D animation, special effects, video and game industries — announced today that it downloaded the IBM BladeCenter Open Specification to provide a turnkey renderfarm management solution.
Leading Web security and governance expert Layer 7 Technologies Inc. has teamed with Tarari Inc., the award-winning XML acceleration company, to deliver a next generation XML Firewall technology for BladeCenter. The Layer 7/Tarari technology will form the XML Security component of the IBM BladeCenter Security Bundle offering.

IBM adds McDATA to its Industry-Leading Switch Offerings

Previously first-to-market with embedded Fibre Channel switching for blade servers, IBM is now first-to-market today with a McDATA switch module further expanding our portfolio of embedded SAN switches. BladeCenter continues to deliver on its strategy of providing industry leading Storage Area Network (SAN) switch support.

More: ibm.com