IBM’s Blade Goes Virtual

August 7th, 2007: IBM has unveiled the industry’s first integrated, blade server-based data virtualisation offering.

Announced at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, IBM has unveiled its Information Server Blade, integrating virtualisation into its existing Blade server solution. The new package is actually a combination of IBM’s blade server design, data inegration software platform with Intel processors. The solutions have been “combined and applied to create new innovations for solving customer problems," said Alex Yost, vice president and business line executive, IBM BladeCenter.

Blade servers are high density, self contained server units that save on space when compared to their rack mounted cousins. These features have made Blade servers an attractive option for some data centres and has fueled a market boom in the five years since their release.

“The new Information Server Blade will help clients better manage and exploit data for business advantage" Yost said. Utilising the latest version of Red Hat Linux, the system is based on IBM BladeCenter HS21 servers, running on Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors.

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