Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.