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Build Your Own Blade Server
fw3 writes "Information week is reporting
that IBM and Intel are opening up the standards for the eServer BladeCenter. 'The companies will make available the design specifications for IBM's eServer BladeCenter product... hardware vendors can build "BladeCenter compatible" networking switches, blade adapter cards, and appliance and communications blades for enterprise networks.' Not really a new strategy for IBM, ISA of course was open from the start, IBM's technical references for the original PCs contained nearly all of the engineering data needed to build a PC. Looking further back I've been told by a reputable source that RCA was able to fully duplicate the System 360 System/360, mainframe working just a month behind IBM's own schedule by using IBM's published tech reports. (Of course IBM *didn't* share the details of OS/360, leaving RCA with a box but no OS.) See also stories from EETimes, CNN."
I would sure hate to be cat when the VPs read the heading I am sure something was kicked. Sun needs to read the writing on the wall, newspaper, toilet paper, everywhere - consumers are seeking alternatives from proprietary. Sun's Blade should have been the one in this heading yet they are happy chugging along while companies move forward. Sun is growing Dim.
As for IBM and the RCA scandal, where is the OS/360 today. I wonder if it would have had deeper market penetration if IBM had extended the OS to RCA? Could basically going proprietary with the OS been less successful rather than opening it?
Well this does seem to open up a new market for clone blade servers, but I'm just not sure who would actually purchase one.
Chances are, if you're going to be spending that kind of money on a server, you're probably going to want something from a reputed vendor, with good support, etc.
> IBM's technical references for the original PCs contained nearly all of the
> engineering data needed to build a PC
Yeah, after plenty of legal action!
This was probably the same model they had in mind for the PC. They wanted to use commodity hardware and even encourage clone makers because they knew that would help allow them to match hardware prices of other high-volume competitors. They figured that they would maintain control of the platform through their proprietary BIOS, and that any clone manufacturers would have to license the BIOS from IBM.
Software vendors would write to the BIOS calls, and IBM would command a position akin to the present-day Microsoft, where they would be the arbiter of the standard interface between application software and hardware. That may explain why they outsourced the DOS OS to Microsoft; they may have thought of it as just a layer over the BIOS. They knew that versions of DOS that ran over other low-level APIs (of which there were a few examples) wouldn't be quite compatible enough to become popular, so they didn't bother to get exclusive control of DOS.
Unfortunately for IBM, the BIOS wasn't that hard to reverse engineer in a clean room environment, clones of the BIOS enabled Microsoft to sell 100% compatible versions of DOS to anyone, and the rest was history.
I guess the lesson to be learned is that if you're going to use software to maintain control over a commodity hardware market, make sure that the software is too crufty and complex to reverse engineer in a reasonable amount of time.
When it left, it went from Michigan to Georgia, then on boat to Taiwan, where it's probably polluting groundwater to this day.
IIRC RCA wasn't the only company to mimic IBM's systems as I thought that was the business model for Amdahl.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
IBM has historically been a friend of open hardware standards?
If they're trying to make that point.. well, it's just historical revisionism.
Yes, ISA was open. That's why IBM tried to push the MicroChannel bus architecture.
As for mainframes.. IBM invented what we now call FUD to battle Honeywell and Amdahl and the like.
And I'd like to see someone try and build a mainframe clone today. IBM has some seriously secret stuff in those boxes. My father is a mainframe veteran, and he knows some of this stuff. He can't say what, though, because he's under an NDA.
So if you're trying to float the idea that IBM builds hardware to open specifications and always has.. you're just wrong.
I've built some very dense blades (for off the self hardware) and for very CHEAP money. I need to see better blades. I could produce a 2 amd system in a 1u, which is great for high cpu hosting (like online gaming).
In the end I found it cheaper to just rent servers, and let the isp worry about the space. But if I owned a datacenter, I would be building my own racks.
open the specs, lets get back to building render farms.
I think your talking about the MicroChannel architecture(MCA) in the early PS/2 series while much of the rest of the industry pushed E-ISA and later PCI. The telling thing to me was that at the time E-ISA came out an issue of Byte magazine ran a tech article that talked about everyting from signal timeing in the bus on up while an article (another month) about MCA talked about it being a "16-lane superhiway in you PC". IBM was all about propritary hardware at the time.
If you have used the IBM blade frame, i really wouldn't understand why anyone would want to copy it. I have never seen such downtime. Posting as an anonymmous coward so that my employeer doesn't fire me.