IBM Announces Dainty Blades

June 15, 2007: After inklings last month that it would be shifting some focus out of the data centre and into SME and branch offices, IBM has shrunk down its Blade computing platform claiming it can help smaller firms reduce energy use, IT complexity and their overall IT footprint by up to 80 percent.

Called the BladeCenter S, the system has been adapted to cater for every small business need without requiring any special support infrastructure or IT skills to deploy.

IBM says the new Blade has been designed to run standard services such as antivirus and firewalls, email, back-up and recovery, VoIP and file and print services, and do it within a single system.

The BladeCenter S can, according to Big Blue, be dumped on a desktop and plugged into a standard 110 volt power outlet, and can house up to six blade servers at a time. This means it can reduce the 25 to 45 servers used by an average mid-size firm by up to 80 percent, minimising administration and energy requirements dramatically.

“Growing businesses with constrained resources have been grappling with ways to leverage technology advances to improve their competitive advantage without increasing costs,” said Alex Yost, vice president and business line executive for IBM BladeCenter.

“IBM's introduction of a purpose built BladeCenter for small offices and distributed locations will now help smaller firms get the simplification and integration that the biggest companies have been getting from blades, in a package that is optimised for their business.”

Blade’s were originally designed to help large enterprises escape conventional methods of business computing that encouraged new servers to be added at will, turning data centres into enormous server “farms”, wasting both staffs management time and energy resources.

With Blade technology now finally trickling down the food chain, smaller companies can enjoy all the benefits of enterprise-level technology, without the abject costs and complexity.

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