IBM Talks Up Xcalibur Blade Server Strategy

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Early this year, Hewlett-Packard launched its "Powerbar" blade servers, which are based on the CompactPCI standard, used by telecommunications companies and service providers to create modular processor, storage, networking, and other peripheral cards that plug into a backplane and effectively create a local area network in a box. Under the CompactPCI standard, these cards, which have been rechristened as "blades," have specific size and interconnection characteristics, which means that cards made for one CompactPCI server should plug into another. In theory, for instance, companies could plug the CompactPCI cards made by Sun Microsystems for its Netra line of Solaris servers into the HP Powerbar chassis, and they would work. HP has been pressing for a new blade standard called the Open Blade specification, which has been largely ignored and even mocked for supporting CompactPCI.

A few weeks after HP launched its blade servers, Compaq launched its "QuickBlade" ProLiant BL series of blade servers, which jam as many as 280 processors into a single frame. The QuickBlade servers--like IBM's Xcalibur and Sun's unnamed future blade machines, which are based on its "Cheetah" UltraSparc-III and "Jalapeno" UltraSparc-IIIi processors--are based on proprietary blade specifications. This means that cards and chassis for all of these machines are not interchangeable, so blade server vendors will be able to exercise a certain amount of account control and have a degree of customer lock-in. This proprietary philosophy eventually may be crushed by consumer choice, but in the meantime it gives vendors extra money they can use to fund further blade research. That's what vendors are telling me, at least. The real story is that analysts at International Data Corporation reckon the blade server market is growing faster than the rack-mounted server market, and will reach about $2.9 billion in sales by 2005. Incidentally, revenues in the tower server market are declining, so you can see why the major server vendors want to talk about products they don't yet have ready for market. Sun, IBM, and Dell, all of which are expected to deliver blade servers later this year, don't want companies to buy products from HP, Compaq, or upstarts like RLX Technologies before they get their own products in the field. Talk is a defensive maneuver.

So it comes as no surprise that IBM is this week talking, however vaguely, about its Xcalibur blade servers, which will be sold under the name eServer BladeCenter. IBM says it will first deliver two-way blade servers that use Intel's "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors to create two-way-capable blade servers. It looks like IBM's blades will be using a mix of chipsets from Intel and ServerWorks.

IBM also plans to announce storage blades, which will bear the moniker TotalStorage, as well as networking blades (LAN cards, switches, routers, and hubs, presumably), and probably system management blades, too. These blade servers will support InfiniBand I/O technologies, but it is unclear if InfiniBand, rather than Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet, will be the interconnection backplane of the BladeCenter machines.

The executive in charge of the Xcalibur project is none other than Tom Jarosh, who used to be general manager of IBM's MidMarket Server Division (AS/400 and iSeries and a smattering of Windows servers) and who is now vice president of business development and blade servers within IBM's Server Group. Jarosh says IBM will eventually deliver blade servers that use Intel Itanium and its own Power series of RISC processors. The initial Pentium Xeon blades, which will be available in the third quarter of this year, will support Linux and Windows 2000 operating systems and use the Prestonia chips and probably the Grand Champion chipset from ServerWorks. IBM will presumably launch S-Star PowerPC and Power4 blade servers that run its AIX variant of the Unix operating systems, as well as Linux. It is unclear if IBM will offer OS/400-based blades. OS/400 could run on any PowerPC-based or Power-based blades within the BladeCenter machines, in theory. It might be a very interesting thing to do. But IBM has made no commitments to do this.

IBM will also make use of software rejuvenation and systems management technologies already included in its xSeries tower and rack-mounted servers, as well as a bunch of Project eLiza systems-management technologies that are embodied in a program called IBM Director, which is already available for xSeries machines. IBM has launched its own standard, called the BladeCenter Alliance program, aimed ensuring software and hardware interoperability. How this will mesh with HP's Open Blade standard is unclear, but odds are that it will not.