Intel Launches White Box Blades as New York State Probes

Published: January 15, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Intel has been transforming itself from a chip and chipset maker into a platform vendor, which is a tricky business when you don't want to compete with your server channel partners but when you do want to help those players along who do not have big budgets to do product research, development, and engineering. For years, Intel has created and manufactured so-called white box servers (those with no particular brand), and last week the company launched a new blade server design aimed at small and medium businesses.

The new Modular Server, as this white box design is called, consists of a 6U rack-mounted chassis that makes use of very compact and energy efficient 2.5-inch SAS disk drives. The chassis houses up to six two-socket blade servers, which are mounted horizontally and stacked vertically, and has two seven-bank bays for the 14 disk drives in the machine. The server blades are diskless to reduce the amount of heat in the box and because the basic assumption for servers these days is that they will use shared storage and be virtualized, thus obviating the need for on-blade storage, even for operating system booting. The front of the chassis also has a hot-swap I/O fan module. The back of the chassis has two Gigabit Ethernet switch modules (each with 10 external ports and 12 internal ports), two storage control modules (which provide an integrated storage area network and which provide RAID 1, 5, 6, and 10 data protection across the disks in the chassis), four power supplies (for 3+1 redundancy), and two more fan modules. The blades also have an integrated SAS controller, and disks in the cages can be linked back to blades using these controllers as well if customers don't want to use the SAN configuration.

Intel's Modular Server white box blade server

The blades used in the Modular Server use the latest Intel 5000P chipset and can support the company's dual-core and quad-core Xeon 5100, 5200, 5300, and 5400 series processors. The blades has eight DDR2 fully buffered DIMM memory slots, which means 16 GB is what people can afford (using 2 GB DIMMs), 8 GB is what they will buy (using 1 GB DIMMs), and theoretically 32 GB per blade is supported (using very expensive 4 GB DIMMs). Each blade has two Gigabit Ethernet ports; two more can be added with a mezzanine card. The Modular Server chassis has an internal management module, which provides access to media in the chassis (DVD and CD-ROM drives as well as USB ports) and which allows remote management of the chassis and its devices.

The Modular Server is a clever design, and does not seem to have come through its blade server development partnership with IBM. In the wake of the launch of the BladeCenter blade servers six years ago, IBM and Intel partnered up to co-develop blade technologies that adhered to the BladeCenter design, and Intel also provided white box variants of the BladeCenter chassis and servers to its channel partners. Intel cited Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SpikeSource, Symantec, VMware, and Wasabi Systems as partners in the Modular Server design. None of the key server partners were mentioned. Intel was very keen on pointing out that the Module Server design had interconnection mechanisms for its components that adhere to a set of specifications launched last July by the Server Systems Infrastructure organization.

It is not clear from the SSIforum site exactly who is behind this SSI organization, espousing these standards that Intel is adhering to, but Intel's announcement back in July 2007 said that 185 companies, who create systems or peripherals for them, have joined the SSI organization. These companies include Intel and makers of motherboards, peripherals, and software. But Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, and Sun Microsystems are not on the list.

In a separate announcement, New York State's attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, announced last Thursday that he has launched an antitrust investigation of Intel, citing "potentially monopolistic practices." Cuomo said that he is investigating if Intel violated state and federal antitrust laws by coercing its server, laptop, and desktop computer maker customers to not use X86 and X64 processors made by its main rival in the market, Advanced Micro Devices. That company is in the middle of its own antitrust battle with Intel, which is making its way through the courts at a glacial pace.

"After careful preliminary review, we have determined that questions raised about Intel's potential anticompetitive conduct warrant a full and factual investigation," Cuomo said in a statement. "Protecting fair and open competition in the microprocessor market is critical to New York, the United States, and the world. Businesses and consumers everywhere should have the ability to easily choose the best products at the best price and only fair competition can guarantee it. Monopolistic practices are a serious concern particularly for New Yorkers who are navigating an information-intensive economy."