BANGALORE, INDIA: IBM is all set to buy Blade Network Technologies, a Santa Clara, CA, based vendor of Gigabit and 10G Ethernet network infrastructure solutions that reside in blade servers and server and storage racks.

This move comes as IBM and rivals such as Hewlett-Packard, Oracle Corp, and Cisco Systems are developing or acquiring new technologies in response to clients' demands for better and cheaper ways to manage their data centres.

Also Read: Mainframe not yet a has-been: IBM

Blade, which spun off from Nortel's Blade Server Switch Unit and was established in 2006, has been an IBM sales partner since 2002. The company has operations in Canada, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Japan and Korea.

While IBM has long competed with HP and Oracle, its rivalry with network equipment maker Cisco is relatively new. Cisco's recent entry into servers has prompted HP and IBM to retaliate by buying or forming close partnerships with networking firms.

Blade offers a range of top-of-rack and bladed 1-10 Gigabit Ethernet switches for high-performance computing (HPC), multimedia (VOD, IPTV, VoIP), online gaming, financial analysis, security, cloud networking, Web 2.0 and other I/O-intensive applications.

Blade’s top-of-rack and blade server switches exemplify a set of rules for the data center known as Rackonomics – an economical approach for provisioning essential server, storage and networking infrastructure that empowers enterprise data centers to control costs and contain sprawl while realizing massive scale-out economies.

RackSwitch
Blade RackSwitch is a 1-10 Gigabit Ethernet top-of-rack data centre switch.

RackSwitch product family extends virtualization by mirroring the benefits of server virtualization within the network at the rack level, saves energy through rack-friendly cooling and alleviates pain by removing complexity through simplified management and fabric convergence.

RackSwitch is the only switch designed specifically for IBM’s iDataPlex, a custom-configured rack system featuring design innovations in cooling and efficiency to address I/O-intensive Web 2.0 applications and cloud computing.