IBM BladeCenter With Native 10 Gigabit Ethernet Made Possible by Blade.org Collaboration

IBM BladeCenter With Native 10 Gigabit Ethernet Made Possible by Blade.org Collaboration

Blade.org Summit on Innovation & Entrepreneurship — BLADE Network Technologies Inc. (BLADE), the leading provider of network switching infrastructure for blade servers, and NetXen, a leading provider of breakthrough 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) technology and products, announced that they have teamed up through Blade.org to deliver the industry’s first solution offering 10GE connectivity for blade servers. BLADE, NetXen and other members of the Blade.org open community, dedicated to creating solutions based on the blade server platform pioneered by IBM and Intel, celebrated the organization’s first anniversary of blade innovation today.

BLADE and NetXen collaborated with IBM BladeCenter to develop the breakthrough 10GE technology, which addresses the expected strong demand for 10GE blade servers for virtualization and server consolidation, High Performance Computing workloads, and bandwidth-intensive applications such as IPTV, Web 2.0 and massively multiplayer online gaming. The BLADE-NetXen solution includes BLADE’s Nortel 10Gb Ethernet Switch Module (10GbESM) and the NetXen 10G Ethernet Expansion Card. The solution offers breakthrough 10GE pricing of less than $550 per port that is significantly less than other vendors’ offerings.

The BLADE 10GE switch provides 20 10GE ports — 14 ports internal to the chassis and six external ports for connection to the network. The BLADE switch is used with IBM BladeCenter in conjunction with a new dual-port 10GE expansion card from NetXen that can support multi-protocol offload. The BLADE-NetXen solution improves throughput, reduces host CPU utilization to boost system performance and enables a converged network fabric consisting of data and storage.

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