BLADE's Unified FabricArchitecture

BLADE’s Unified FabricArchitecture™ (UFA) – the industry’s fastest, smartest, most integrable and most proven data center network fabric – is designed to reduce the cost and complexity of deploying physical and virtual data center infrastructure. BLADE’s Unified FabricArchitecture provides a faster, virtual machine aware, and proven data center networking platform that allows customers to tie together best-of-breed servers, storage, hypervisors and core networking systems. BLADE’s Unified FabricArchitecture and Rackonomics approach ensure that customers that have already invested billions of dollars in their data centers can take advantage of the best innovations in the industry and achieve the lowest possible cost of ownership for their IT infrastructure.

BLADE’s UFA brings together some of the industry’s most proven technology and IT elements into a very compelling solution. These elements include:

1.     BLADEOS™ – The world’s most widely deployed data center fabric OS with 7.5 million ports in production deployment. Over 9,500 enterprises in the world have deployed this fabric OS in their data centers, including 350 of the Fortune 500 companies.

2.     VMready™ – Network virtualization extensions to BLADEOS that make it ideally suited for customers who are deploying server virtualization in their data centers. BLADE’s VMready is hypervisor agnostic, does not require customers to upgrade to the latest version of hypervisor software and ships standard with every 10GE blade switch.

3.     vNIC™ – Converged fabric extensions to BLADEOS that allow customers to converge their LAN, SAN, and management networks onto a single wire. vNIC is open and supports everything from mainframes to rack optimized servers to tower systems, to purpose built application appliances (e.g. data warehousing, security, etc.) from multiple vendors.                                   

4.     Smart Server Control™ – The industry’s most sophisticated server control and CMDB software that presently provides environmental, configuration, I/O and provisioning control for over one million blade servers deployed in data centers around the world.

5.     FabricHarmony™ – Data center fabric element management software that allows customers to effectively manage the BLADE data center fabric elements and cohesively integrate them into a data center-wide management system of their choice (IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, CA UniCenter, HP OpsWare, IBM Director, etc.)

6.     High reliability – The fabric of a data center is critical to system and data center uptime. The actual measured MTBF on BLADE’s data center fabric elements is well over 3 million hours.

7.     Datacenter focus – Unlike most other networking vendors, BLADE is singularly focused on the data center fabric market. As a result, BLADE has created the world’s best Ethernet data center fabric as measured by performance and throughput, latency, loss characteristics, and price-performance.

8.     Partnerships – BLADE recognizes that customers want their problems solved but don’t wish to be held hostage by closed and proprietary systems from a single vendor. As a result, BLADE has designed its fabric to be open, to embrace existing and new systems and allow customers to take advantage of the best innovations available in the market that deliver the lowest cost-of-ownership.

BLADE’s Unified FabricArchitecture Technology Roadmap

This powerful roadmap takes BLADE’s UFA well into this decade and includes:

1. Silicon innovations – with the industry’s leading providers of merchant switch silicon to embed functions in an ASIC that will enable customers to improve the performance and efficiency of network and I/O intensive applications such as security, data warehousing and rich media (HD/3D) content distribution.

2. Rack infrastructure – rapid provisioning and control – BLADE is actively working to add extensions to its Smart Server Control software to provide environmental, configuration, I/O and provisioning control for different server form factors in a multi-vendor environment.

3. Extreme reliability – BLADE will extend its reliability advantages into innovations that will dramatically reduce the operating expense associated with data center infrastructure.

4. 40GE and 100GE innovations – BLADE is working to enhance the performance of its fabric products to 40GE and 100GE speeds and extend the scaling characteristics of its fabric through the implementation of the Distributed Fabric Protocol (DFP), a BLADE invention.

5. Expanded eco-system of partners – BLADE is actively working with other technology vendors in the industry to enhance the applicability, performance, and functionality of UFA for specific vertical applications that will be deployed on “private” or “public” cloud infrastructures.