IBM’s BladeCenter machines house 14 dual-processor Xeon DP server blades in a single chassis and connected to each other by a Gigabit Ethernet backplane. IBM is going to Nortel Networks to build the switches to link up the individual blades in a chassis to each other to improve the security and performance of the network connectivity between blades and the collection of switches, routers, and networking appliances that handle traffic management on TCP/IP networks.
Rival Hewlett Packard Co put a Gigabit LAN switch in the Powerbar Itanium and PA-RISC blade servers it announced in late 2001, and has promised that they will eventually have 10 Gigabit switches inside the chassis. While HP said after it merged with Compaq that the Powerbar machines, which adhere to the CompactPCI spec for blade servers for the telco industry, would still be sold, no one at HP has said one word about the machines in six months.
The HP QuickBlade ProLiant BL e-Class entry blade servers have a Gigabit switch as an optional in-chassis component, and the and p-Class two-way and four-way blade servers have Gigabit switches now and will have the capability of Fibre Channel pass through in the second quarter of 2003.
Source: Computerwire
