Blade.org Consortium Adds 18 New Members

Published: April 27, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The fifth annual Server Blade Summit was held recently, and server maker IBM, which has become the dominant supplier of blade servers (not server blades, people, but blade servers), was on hand to talk up its Blade.org consortium, which it launched earlier this year with 42 different providers. Blade.org has now added another 18 companies to its roster.

IBM has three different tiers of promotion and support for the blade server market. First, it has partnered with Intel to create what they call a standard blade server form factor and chassis. IBM makes its own BladeCenter variant of this standard, and Intel also sells blades based on this form factor (and often using different technologies than IBM does) to its OEM customers. In late 2004, IBM and Intel opened up the specification of the BladeCenter chassis to allow makers of networking gear, peripherals, and other electronic devices to interface with the BladeCenter, and to date, some 350 companies have downloaded the spec and are working on products for the chassis, according to Juhi Jotwani, director of IBM BladeCenter solutions. IBM also runs a program called the BladeCenter Alliance, which it uses to promote applications on its own BladeCenters, and then there is the Blade.org consortium, where IBM and Intel are but two of 60 companies involved in making devices for the BladeCenter boxes. Of course, you can bet that IBM and Intel have more sway than anyone else, and right now, in fact, Doug Balog, the vice president in charge of the BladeCenter line at IBM, is the chairman of Blade.org.

The key to the success of Blade.org, which IBM believes is driving its sales, is that it is not just a bunch of hardware vendors arguing about a standard. Because Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and Fujitsu-Siemens are not members, there is no holy war about blade form factors--a fight that any real standard bearer in the blade biz would have to take on. But IBM wants to establish a standard using market share, and so far, it is getting some traction because hardware and software partners are helping it build out the BladeCenter ecosystem. "Typically, in any kind of consortium, it is either a set of hardware or a set of software vendors," says Jotwani. "Blade.org has a very diverse set of companies, with resellers and distributors as well as hardware and software providers. While we believe that the more, the better, we have been focusing on the diversity of members in the organization rather than the number."

One of the new members to Blade.org is DataCom Systems, which is odd in that it does not appear to have a Web site but which has created a PCI-X peripheral card for the Xeon-based HS20 blade servers from IBM that allow it to manage up to 32 video surveillance cameras. Jotwani says that the typical retail store can have up to 200 cameras keeping an eye on shoppers, which means that a 14-blade BladeCenter chassis can handle as many as 448 cameras. This solution will be sold exclusively by IBM reseller Avnet exclusively on the BladeCenters, which is why DataCom Systems doesn't need a Web site, apparently. Jotwani says that casinos, hospitals, banks, and governments are all loving this server-based surveillance solution, and cites statistics from IDC that predict the video surveillance market will grow to $24 billion in 2006, with one quarter of that dough going to servers, storage, and other gear and one quarter going for software; the remainder will be spent on cameras and other equipment.