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Cisco, IBM Announce New Partnership, Network Device
karthik_r085 writes "According to Washington Technology, Integrators considering server blade technology to simplify data center architectures stand to benefit from today's partnering announcement by Cisco Systems Inc. and IBM Corp. The companies introduced a combined solution that integrates Cisco switches and IBM blade servers into one unit to help speed deployment and manage data center costs."
If you have a box of blades... especially if you're going for lower-power blades like for a web farm, by adding "content switching" a.k.a. load balancing, with a whole lotta gigabit networking, you can have a highly reliable, very high I/O webfarm "in a box".
They've been doing this with their blade servers for a while. The only thing new here is that the previous switch-module offerings were made by either D-Link or (if I remember correctly) Nortel.
A lot of people mistakenly seem to think these are blades similar to what go into a Cisco 69xx chassis. They're not. They're a module that goes into the back of the blades that allow you to connect your blade server to the rest of your network. You're not going to find ports for plugging in any other servers.
It might seem like a no-brainer, but the Cisco module for the blade servers doesn't work that way. They're basically just a NIC for the blades in the server -- you still need to run a cable (or a couple for a trunked link) from the switch module to whatever switches the rest of your network devices connect to.
I doubt that. Our IBM rep told us about the upcoming release of the new switch module, and said the primary reason for it was because customers wanted something that would interoperate better with their networks than the previous hardware they were using.
Putting Linux on the switch modules would totally defeat the purpose of these new modules, which is 100% Cisco compatibility.
I work at IBM, and we've been doing partnerships and company acquisitions steadily in the 6 years I've been there. Some of the larger deals get a lot of press (like Lotus and Tivoli) but there are LOTS of smaller ones that don't get much mention beyond their particular industry segment (security, storage, etc).
For example, on April 6 we bought Trigo Technologies (they make supply chain middleware). No big fanfare on this one, but business goes on...
Dual main boards.
Each chassis contains two main (backplane) boards, two power supplies and up to four switch modules (2 ethernet and 2 optional fibrechannel). Each blade has two 1G ethernet connections and two power connections, one to each backplane board. And, optionally, two more fibrechannel.
Actually, what you're referring to as a mainboard is a passive backplane. It's incredibly unlikely to fail, and even if one of the traces did go bad, there are two data paths for everything as another poster said.
Yes, the one bit that isn't redundant in these is the motherboard in each blade, but that only affects a single blade. Every other component in these systems is redundant and hot-swappable.