IBM, Rackable Team Up on Blades

IBM and Rackable Systems today announced a joint sales agreement whereby Rackable Systems will offer IBM's BladeCenter systems for installation inside of Rackable's ICE Cube modular datacenters.
The ICE Cube is a standard-size shipping container with all of the racks for an ultradense datacenter installed inside. Customers can fill it with Rackable's line of 1U to 9U racks or they can add a BladeCenter chassis to use IBM blades.
The deal involves the use of IBM BladeCenter T or HT systems, which are NEBS-3/ETSI-compliant, meaning they’re certified for use in telecommunications environments and carrier facilities.
Pund-IT Principle Analyst Charles King said it's a win for both companies. "It gives Rackable a way to jump into the blade solution space without having to spend any money developing it themselves," he said, adding that developing the blades is an expensive process. "And it allows IBM to sell BladeCenter as an OEM product -- not that Rackable will put its logo on it."
Tony Carrozza, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Rackable, said adding the BladeCenter products to the its modular datacenter "puts us in a position to offer customers a broader set of solutions, from cloud computing to enterprise apps, which is what the BladeCenter allows us to do going forward," said
Blades from IBM (NYSE: IBM) are inherently different from a Rackable (NASDAQ: RACK) rack-mounted system in that IBM blades are for more general-purpose computing, whereas Rackable systems are meant for ultradense computing projects.
"We don't have what you would consider to be a true blade product," Carrozza told InternetNews.com. "The BladeCenter is a true blade product with a self-contained fabric, management software, redundancy and resiliency in it," he explained, adding that besides rack servers Rackable typically offers scale-out servers. "It's blade like but doesn't have its own switching fabric built into the chassis," he said.
Plus, Rackable's systems are based on Intel and AMD chips, whereas IBM blades also offer the option of IBM's POWER5 and POWER6 processors.
The ICE Cube is available in 20- or 40-foot container sizes and can hold up to 1,344 dual-socket blades with quad-core Intel Xeons or 672 quad socket, dual-core AMD Opteron blades.
The BladeCenter chassis slots right into a Rackable ICE Cube, so long as you remember to remove the wheels that are on the chassis. It then uses the ICE Cube power and cooling system for operation and management.
IBM BladeCenter T and HT are available immediately via Rackable Systems and its channel partners.