Guild Companies

Sources at IBM say the company is working with blade server developer partner Intel to create a special version of its BladeCenter blade server chassis. The new BladeCenter T servers will meet the stringent requirements of telecom companies and the network equipment suppliers with customers in telephone and other communications services. With these servers and the carrier-grade Linux on Intel-based blades, IBM hopes to take away business from Sun Microsystems, which dominates the telecom space.

The BladeCenter T blade server chassis, which is expected to ship sometime in the first half of 2004, will support the existing HS20 two-way blade servers that IBM announced last year as it entered the nascent blade server market. The HS20 blades are based on Intel's "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors, which run at 2.4 GHz, 2.8 GHz, and 3.06 GHz. The 7U BladeCenter chassis can support up to 14 of the HS20 blades, and includes dual Gigabit Ethernet midplanes, redundant power supplies, and switching equipment to glue the blades into a network cluster. The BladeCenter T chassis is a completely different animal in terms of size, shape, and electronics, but it will support the same HS20 blades and related switches that IBM already sells.

This is an important differentiator for IBM, says Jeff Benck, director of eServer product marketing at IBM. Many companies-most importantly Sun and Hewlett-Packard--sell the network equipment providers (those that make switches based on server technology for telecom companies) a different line of servers than their regular commercial products. This is because telecom companies have unique requirements such as supporting DC power (instead of AC) and a more ruggedized design that will stand up to a wider range of temperatures and generally more abusive environments. To further complicate matters, the sizing standards for telecom equipment are physically different from the form factors commonly used in commercial computing.

That's why the BladeCenter T chassis will have a different size and shape, says Benck. The BladeCenter T chassis has an 8U form factor, but it is only 20 inches deep instead of 28 inches. In the original BladeCenter chassis, the switching equipment and power supplies were in the back, while the HS20 blades ran across the front. The BladeCenter T chassis stacks switches on top of the blades and brings power supplies and other equipment alongside the blades. There is less room for blades, and that is why the telecom version of the BladeCenter chassis only supports eight blades.

Benck says IBM is announcing the BladeCenter T servers now to give network equipment providers and telecom companies time to plan for their next upgrade cycle. IBM has a team of Linux programmers in Beaverton, Oregon, working with the Linux community on the carrier-grade version of Linux, which is in its first release but which still needs work to compete with Unix. Benck says it is already competing. IBM is seeing a lot of Solaris shops moving or working on a move to Linux-on-Intel equipment, he says, because of the money they can save on hardware, software, and services. When asked whether or not IBM would be aggressive and support the Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 implementation of Unix that Sun has created for 32-bit Intel processors on the HS20 and future blades, Benck just laughed. Then, he said that so many companies are moving off Solaris to Linux that IBM didn't see the need. He added, however, that IBM's partners could certainly offer that support, and that a number of them are kicking around the idea. It is obviously a much cleaner sell to push IBM NEBS-compliant blade servers running Solaris against Sun NEBS-compliant telecom servers that are also running Solaris. The operating system issues are less dramatic than a jump from Solaris to Linux.

As for IBM's own AIX environment, both the BladeCenter and BladeCenter T machines will be able to use the future Power-based blades that IBM leaked information about last year and which will probably be based on the single-core PowerPC 970 processor (code-named GPUL or Giga Processor Ultra Lite) that IBM is said to be creating for the next generation of Apple desktops, workstations, and servers. That Power-based blade will come out later this year, and will support AIX and Linux. IBM is also readying a four-way Intel-based blade, presumably based on the "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors and presumably called the HS40. The two BladeCenter machines will also be able to use blades based on future Xeon processors, says Benck, which probably means the 4 MB cache version of the Gallatin as well as the "Nocona" refresh of the Xeon DP, due in the first half of 2004, and the "Potomac" Xeon MP and "Jayhawk" Xeon DP processors Intel has slated for the second half of 2004.