IBM close to launching revamped blades

IDG News Service - IBM is drawing closer to releasing a new chassis for its blade servers, with an announcement possible as early as next week, when the company is set to stage a major hardware launch in New York.

Back in November, IBM's Doug Balog, vice president for eServer BladeCenter at IBM, said the company expected to release the new BladeCenter chassis in 2006. The new chassis will be aimed at "a number of high-end customers who need more I/O bandwidth," he told IDG News Service in an interview at that time.

The new chassis, which will offer improved networking capabilities, shouldn't be viewed as a replacement to the existing chassis, but rather as an expanded offering, according to Balog, and it will be compatible with the current chassis. IBM is also on track to update its PowerPC-based blade to a dual-core model, based on the PowerPC 970MP 64-bit chip, which should appear in the first quarter of this year.

IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. so far have dominated the blade server market as "a two-horse race," according to Gordon Haff, a senior analyst at research company Illuminata Inc. This intense competition means both vendors tend to "trash talk" about the other's capabilities, he said. For instance, HP claims IBM's new chassis is proof that the company has problems with power consumption and cooling of its blades, according to Haff.

"Everyone is essentially in the same boat," Haff said in a phone interview Wednesday. Blade vendors would like to maintain one chassis, but competition puts pressure on them to update frequently. It's a question of finding a balance -- "the most reasonable compromise" between those two extremes, he added.

Lining up IBM blades against those from HP, each vendor has different strengths, Haff said. However, IBM is somewhat ahead in market share, he said.

For the third quarter of 2005, market research company IDC had IBM as No. 1 in blade-server revenue with 42% market share, followed by HP with 31.6% and Dell Inc. trailing in third with 9% market share.

Haff pointed out that although the blade market is growing rapidly, blades account for only a small percentage of the overall server market. IDC in its third-quarter 2005 figures showed blades representing 4.6% of total quarterly global server revenue.

IBM wouldn't confirm what the Feb. 8 event will consist of, modestly billing it in invitations as a glimpse at "technologies that could change the way you look at computing." A company spokesman would describe it only as "a systems-level event" that will be led by Bill Zeitler, senior vice president and