Blade Server Adoption Accelerating, Fueled by Convergence of Virtualization, Consolidation & 10 Gig

My good friend Jeffrey Birnbaum may live on the east coast, and I on the west coast, but on many things it's like we're both sitting in the same room. Especially when it comes to where we think the server market is going.

The other day he told me that he's convinced blade servers will garner the lion's share of new server deployments once IT managers realize the tremendous benefits they bring to the datacenter.

In fact, he said, blade servers do a better job at desktop and server virtualization, and deliver better TCO than standalone servers.

When you combine blades with newer technologies such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet, which has reached the critical $500 per port price point on blades well ahead of conventional chassis-based switches, blades now make economic sense for even applications that need the most throughput and bandwidth, combined with the lowest latency.

I couldn't agree more. So I wrote an article about this for the Data Center Journal.

As a matter of fact, it was the brilliant engineers here at BLADE who gave the blade server industry its first taste of the power of 10 Gigabit Ethernet way back in June 2006, and we haven't slowed down since.

Here is our current list of 10G offerings for blade server systems:

• Nortel 10Gb Ethernet Switch Module for IBM BladeCenter



• Nortel 10Gb Uplink Ethernet Switch Module for IBM BladeCenter



• HP 10Gb Ethernet BL-c Switch for HP BladeSystem c-Class



• HP 1:10Gb Ethernet BL-c Switch for HP BladeSystem



• BNT’s 10Gb XFP modules