USA: Blade servers equipped with embedded 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) networking can support large-scale business applications at near wire-speeds in consolidated blade server architectures using NetApp Ethernet and IP networked storage.

Members of Blade.org -- BLADE Network Technologies Inc. (BLADE), a leading provider of network switching infrastructure for blade servers; Chelsio Communications (Chelsio), a provider of 10GbE network interface cards for servers and storage; and Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp), a provider of storage and data management solutions -- recently announced the completion of a collaborative study through Blade.org that demonstrated this capability.

The study, conducted on the IBM BladeCenter platform, found that by supporting multiple protocols, workloads and integrated data management across a 10GbE network, customers can protect their investment, lower IT infrastructure costs, prevent datacenter equipment sprawl, and implement consolidation and virtualization without sacrificing flexibility.

"Ethernet has a very good reputation for its stability, flexibility and longevity. Customers expect these same characteristics, in addition to the increased bandwidth that 10 Gigabit Ethernet brings, for their Next Generation Data Centers," said Joel Reich, General Manager for the NetApp SAN and iSCSI Business Unit. "Our intent with this study of 10 Gigabit Ethernet networked storage is to demonstrate the viability and readiness of blade server architectures integrated with scalable storage in order to simulate environments that are 'production-ready."

"The collaborative effort between BLADE and NetApp is indicative of the type of community-driven model that customers expect from the IT industry and, specifically, Blade.org, the industry group driving innovation in blade-based solutions," said Vikram Mehta, President and CEO of BLADE Network Technologies.

"Customers can use the results of our study to improve the performance of their computing, network, and storage infrastructures using blade servers equipped with our embedded 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, network interface cards from Chelsio, and 10GbE storage subsystems from NetApp. Our solution can simplify fabric topology in today's datacenters without compromising reliability," he added.

"Chelsio's Unified Wire technology on the server side and the filer side of this topology demonstrates the benefits of fabric convergence on Ethernet. Not only can the unmodified storage, clustering, and networking applications be run concurrently, they can do so with higher performance than Fibre Channel and InfiniBand and at no incremental cost to the customer," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio. "Additionally, the fact that this convergence is routable will enable a whole new class of applications and usability for the enterprise installations."