* Various vendor approaches to incorporating storage with server blades
As companies seek to cast server blades as general-purpose servers, they are building out their server blade infrastructures in a similar fashion to traditional server-network-storage connections.
HP and IBM have added Fibre Channel connectivity to their blades, and last week Dell expanded the interconnect options of its server blades with the incorporation of two Fibre Channel switches.
Dell added two McData 4314 Fibre Channel switches to its Modular Server Enclosure for attachment to storage-area networks (SAN). Dell’s PowerEdge 1855 blades can now connect to other blades, the network or to storage with Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand technology from Intel, Brocade, QLogic and Topspin (recently acquired by Cisco).
The McData 4314 Fibre Channel switch for the Dell PowerEdge 1855 is available now, starting at $9,000 for a four-port switch.
By comparison, HP integrates a Gigabit Ethernet switch module, a 2G bit/sec and 4G bit/sec Brocade Fibre Channel switch and a 4G-bit/sec McData SAN switch in its HP BladeSystems.
IBM offers McData six-port Fibre Channel switch modules, Cisco Gigabit Ethernet modules and Nortel Gigabit Ethernet switches, as well as a network-attached storage blade. The company also incorporates Topspin’s InfiniBand products for its eServer BladeCenter server interconnects.
Hitachi, a company new to blades, uses Topspin’s InfiniBand products in its BladeSymphony family.
Sun, on the other hand, has apparently gotten out of the blade server business. It recently retired its Sun Fire B1600 blade server and offers no replacements: https://www.sun.com/products/blades/
Fujitsu Siemens’ Primergy BX600 blade system offers Gigabit Ethernet and 2G bit/sec Fibre Channel switching technology. Bull’s NovaScale blades also incorporate Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity.
And Brocade, a company that specializes in Fibre Channel switches, recently acquired Therion Software to add SAN-based provisioning of server blades.
