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Blade Network Technologies

Blade.org – Study On Storage Consolidation

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Blade.org, a collaborative organization and developer community focused on accelerating the development and adoption of open blade server platforms, announced a new member-driven study on Storage Consolidation, the third of its kind in a series focusing on data center efficiency.

This Blade.org White Paper is available for download for free here. Blade.org member companies NetApp, BLADE Network Technologies and Double-Take Software each made contributions that showcase the advancement of technologies allowing IT professionals to reduce the amount of equipment needed to run an efficient data center.

Key Highlights:

  • Benefits of Storage Consolidation: Efficiency across storage area networks (SAN) has been increased greatly by sharing data across multiple servers on private networks. Operational benefits from storage consolidation include: reduced power and cooling costs, increased capacity sharing, storage provisioning, network boot, software updates, performance, data protection, scalability, simplified backup and recovery, and improved lifecycle management.
  • Server and Storage Virtualization – Complimentary Technologies: Storage virtualization compliments server virtualization by increasing storage efficiency and by enabling rapid deployment of storage resources. The result is increased overall operational efficiency, improved asset utilization, and accelerated business processes.
  • Storage Virtualization: Storage virtualization is delivering dramatic increases in storage utilization. Deduplication, thin provisioning, and rapid cloning, as examples, are greatly reducing the physical storage required to store the exploding data collection and retention in today’s business environment.
  • Storage Consolidation – Before You Start: By utilizing a combination of virtualization and SAN-based or host-based replication technologies, IT personnel can minimize data and application down time during storage migration while allowing users to still access applications with little or no downtime.

Nortel Spinoff Blade Network Technologies Aims To Virtualize Datacenter Racks

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BLADE Network Technologies, the data-center server-switch company spun off from Nortel two years ago, announces the availability of its new RackSwitch network virtualization switches—the only switches designed specifically for IBM’s iDataPlex, an inexpensive, custom-configured rack system featuring design innovations in cooling and efficiency to address Web 2.0-style computing (see iDataPlex coverage on GigaOM and Ars Technica).

BLADE Network Technologies

From the press release:

RackSwitch provides the high-bandwidth communications for IBM iDataPlex in today’s massive scale-out data centers that run I/O-intensive Web 2.0 applications and seek to make the most efficient use of the cloud computing model. Leveraging IBM and BLADE’s common blade server heritage, RackSwitch enables iDataPlex to increase the density networking within a single rack, use significantly less power for networking while maximizing bandwidth available to a single system, employ server-friendly cooling of the networking subsystem and provide 100-percent interoperability with existing network infrastructures. BLADE’s RackSwitch delivers standardized networking with the lowest latency and highest throughput, line-rate/non-blocking switching performance at 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit, with stacking and unified management.

Blade claims leadership in this particular market, having installed more than four million ports connecting more than 800,000 HP, IBM and NEC server blades, with products deployed across 26 market segments.

BLADE’s RackSwitch G8100, a 1U top-of-rack switch equipped with 24 lossless, low-latency 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GE) ports, is designed to equip iDataPlex in high-performance clusters that require 10 Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth with latency of 300 nanoseconds or less. BLADE’s RackSwitch G8000, a 1U top-of-rack switch equipped with 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports and four 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports for uplinks and/or stacking, is designed for the use of iDataPlex for emerging high-volume cloud computing environments.

BLADE’s new RackSwitch products are available for iDataPlex in the US and Canada in June and globally by the end of the year at a starting price of US$5,500. The company will demonstrate the new switches at next week’s Interop conference in Las Vegas.

[Source: New York Times / NetworkWorld]