IBM and Buddies to Launch Blade.org Community

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As part of the announcements for the new System z9 mainframe last week in New York, IBM's Susan Whitney, general manager of Big Blue's xSeries server business, announced that IBM and its key partners for blades have agreed to form a new community called Blade.org. The idea is to promote collaboration between the suppliers of components for IBM's BladeCenter blade server chassis and the customers who use this equipment.

IBM has been itching to establish the BladeCenter as the de facto standard in the commercial blade server industry, and to that end it has been growing its market share in leaps and bounds since entering the market almost a year behind Hewlett-Packard and the then-independent Compaq, who pre-launched its blade servers in 2001 and started rolling them out in early 2002.

Since that time, HP merged with Compaq and took the early lead in the blade server shipments and revenue. Then IBM jumped in, followed by Sun with a tepid offering, and later 2002, IBM got Intel to partner with it to form the BladeCenter Alliance, which meant that Intel would adopt IBM's BladeCenter as a standard of sorts and the two companies would try to foster an ecosystem of peripherals and partners for the machine.

Last year, Dell jumped in with a somewhat aggressive move in blades, and in September, IBM and Intel opened up most of the specifications for the BladeCenter, excepting the core processor blades and the chassis, of course. Soon thereafter, RLX Technologies, the originator of the blade server concept, exited the blade server hardware business, and since then, IBM has been able to pull ahead of HP in terms of market share.

So it comes as no surprise that IBM is trying to keep the heat on HP and to promote the BladeCenter design as a standard in a more indirect way by creating the Blade.org community. At the event last week in New York, Whitney said IBM would start the community and that Brocade Communications, Cisco Systems, Citrix Systems, Network Appliance, Nortel Networks, Novell, and VMware, as well as partner Intel, have expressed a desire to join the community.

Initially, the community will be focused on spurring development of new technologies based on the BladeCenter and on providing testing labs that certify the interoperability of components that plug into the chassis.

Thus far, more than 260 companies have signed up to get the BladeCenter specs as part of the BladeCenter Alliance, and 350 partners are members of the program (some members are system integrators and solution providers, who don't need to see the specs).

It will be interesting to see if IBM goes all the way and creates a real foundation behind blades, much as it did with the Eclipse Foundation for the open source integrated development environment of the same name, then assigns the BladeCenter specs to that foundation, and truly makes the BladeCenter an open standard.

Judging from IBM's past experience in setting up the PC-AT specification and letting it go to see the PC business wrested from its control, this seems unlikely. But if IBM thinks it can sell 10 times the blades servers as it currently does by letting go, Big Blue may yet surprise us all. The odds seem remote, though, so don't bet on it.

In addition to launching the Blades.org community, IBM said last week that it was collaborating with Cisco to create an end-to-end, back-to-front iSCSI infrastructure for the BladeCenter machines. So far, IBM and Cisco have pieced together two reference architectures--one aimed at infrastructure workloads, the other at transaction processing workloads--that demonstrate how customers can weave TCP/IP, Ethernet, and storage area networks together into a seamless network that also includes blade servers.

QLogic, a maker of host bus adapter cards, said it would create an iSCSI expansion card for the BladeCenter chassis. SANRAD announced the V-Storage switch for the BladeCenter for supporting iSCSI protocols, Nominum also announced a blade that combines DNS and DHCP Internet server functions on a blade, and CipherOptics said it was creating an IPsec encryption card for the BladeCenter, too.