<P BLADE Network Technologies Inc., a provider of network switching infrastructure for blade servers, and NetXen, another provider of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) technology and products, announced that they have teamed up to deliver the industry's first solution offering 10GE connectivity for blade servers.
BLADE, NetXen and other members of the Blade.org open community, dedicated to creating solutions based on the blade server platform pioneered by IBM and Intel, just celebrated the organization’s first anniversary of blade innovation.
BLADE and NetXen collaborated with IBM BladeCenter to develop the what they call breakthrough 10GE technology, which addresses the expected strong demand for 10GE blade servers for virtualization and server consolidation, high performance computing workloads, and bandwidth-intensive applications such as IPTV, Web 2.0 and massively multiplayer online gaming.
The BLADE-NetXen solution includes BLADE’s Nortel 10Gb Ethernet Switch Module (10GbESM) and the NetXen 10G Ethernet Expansion Card. The solution offers breakthrough 10GE pricing of less than $550 per port that is significantly less than other vendors’ offering, the partners said.
The BLADE 10GE switch provides 20 10GE ports — 14 ports internal to the chassis and six external ports for connection to the network. The BLADE switch is used with IBM BladeCenter in conjunction with a new dual-port 10GE expansion card from NetXen that can support multi-protocol offload.
The solution improves throughput, reduces host CPU utilization to boost system performance and enables a converged network fabric consisting of data and storage.
Shailesh Naik, vice-president of sales and marketing for BLADE Network Technologies and a member of Blade.org’s board of directors, said working with NetXen and other Blade.org members has enabled us to innovate and create products on the cutting edge. Together, we offer our enterprise customers integrated solutions that extend the market for blade systems into hot new areas like VoIP, IPTV, gaming and security, he said.