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If Microsoft does nothing to fix the problem in a timely manner, that is wrong and makes for poor business...- Anonymous
While some network vendors are jumping out of the blade-server market, others are expanding their reach into blade systems with new partnerships.
Nortel last week said it will spin off its Blade Server Switch Business Unit as the start-up Blade Network Technologies, which will focus solely on building network switches for blade chassis.
Also last week, Dell said it will start offering Cisco Gigabit Ethernet switch modules in its PowerConnect blade servers, in addition to Dell's own brand of blade-server switches.
Observers say vendors' varying positions in the blade-server market result partly from the debate over where network intelligence should reside, in servers or network gear.
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Blade-server switch modules typically offer four to 24 Fast or Gigabit Ethernet ports. The modules occupy a slot in a blade-server chassis, providing interconnectivity for server-blade nodes or connections to network devices outside the blade-server chassis. This latter role is more prevalent, as server vendors integrate Ethernet as the backplane fabric technology, connecting server blades internally in a self-contained LAN.
One expert says installing LAN-switch blades into a blade-server chassis is a logical continuation of the blade server's main role: consolidation.
"Instead of having lots of boxes stacked up, you have one chassis in which you put in many CPU blades," says Dan Golding, a Burton Group analyst. "To tie together what are essentially computers, you need some kind of network backplane. That's what you get out of having an integrated Ethernet switch."
Analyst firms do not break out shipments of Ethernet ports as blade-server switch modules, so the size of this submarket is hard to gauge. Nortel says it has more than 52,000 blade-server switches deployed. The blade-server market as a whole is expected to reach $10 billion by 2009, up from $2 billion last year, IDC says.
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