IBM nears release of revamped blades

IBM may release a new chassis for its blade servers as early as next week when the company stages a major hardware launch in New York on 8 February. IT World writes that the new chassis offering improved networking capabilities shouldn`t be viewed as a replacement to the existing chassis, rather as an expanded offering.

In November, IBM`s Doug Balog, VP, eServer BladeCenter with IBM, said the company expected to release the new BladeCenter chassis in 2006, notes the article. "IBM is also on track to update its PowerPC-based blade to a dual-core model, based on the PowerPC 970MP 64-bit chip, which should appear in the first quarter of this year," it adds.

IBM and Hewlett-Packard dominate the blade server market as "a two-horse race", says Gordon Haff, senior analyst with research company Illuminata.

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Egenera, a maker of blade servers that power utility computing systems, released the third major iteration of its BladeFrame chassis with new cooling technology, according to ServerWatch.

"Blade servers are considered a popular alternative to big iron mainframes - instead of one big machine, some organisations have taken to incorporating several modular blade server racks in their data centres, citing cost and maintenance savings," says the report.

The Control Blade, with eight fabric connectors (24 blades can fit in a BladeFrame chassis), can offer almost triple the network performance and double the disk performance of its predecessor, the Marlboro, Massachusetts, company said in a statement.