IBM Offers Improved Networking for BladeCenter Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM last week rolled out three new networking options for its BladeCenter blade servers that it believes will increase the appeal of these machines among academic, institutional, governmental, and commercial customers who are interested in high-speed networking and cluster computing.

IBM has announced two networking enhancements for the BladeCenter machines. The first is a Gigabit Ethernet switch module that implements what is called Layer 2-7 capability. In describing network resources, Layer 1 is the physical devices and Layer 7 is way up the layers of abstraction to the applications running on the network. The IBM GbE Switch Module for the BladeCenter machines implements the functionality for all those network layers, all on a single card, according to Nortel Networks, which is making it for IBM.

You may remember that only a month ago, Hewlett-Packard announced that it has launched a Gigabit Ethernet switch made by Nortel for its ProLiant BL blade servers. That HP Nortel switch is a little different from the one IBM is getting, however. HP, says Nortel, was unsure how it wanted to implement the higher layers of the network stack and when it wanted to do it, so it instead opted to create a Gigabit switch that implemented Layers 1 and 2 and could be upgraded with support for Layers 3 through 7 when HP felt the customer base was ready. IBM is doing Gigabit Ethernet switching in one fell swoop, and HP is waiting to roll it out gradually. This will probably be a sticking point that both vendors try to leverage as they push their blade boxes into corporate accounts. The ProLiant BL GbE2 Interconnect Switch provides the backplane connectivity between blades in the 6U p-Class QuickBlade chassis and connectivity to the outside world; it has 24 ports. Two of these switches go into each BL p-Class machine, which supports two-way BL20p and four-way BL40p blades.

Back to IBM and the BladeCenter announcements. In addition to the Nortel Gigabit Ethernet switch, Big Blue also last week announced a special adapter card for message-passing interface (MPI) clustering, which is commonly used in massively parallel supercomputer clusters. As the name suggests, the Myrinet Cluster Expansion Card is being OEMed from Myrinet Inc, which is the dominant vendor in this HPC clustering market. This card is based on and uses the same software as the PCI-X MPI networking cards sold by Myrinet and used by many server customers on standalone servers today.

The other new networking enhancement for the BladeCenters is called an Optical Pass-Thru Module, which allows BladeCenters to link to Fibre Channel storage products such as IBM's FAStT and Shark arrays, tape arrays, and various SAN switches.

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