IBM Partners with BLADE Network Technologies in FCoE

BLADE Network Technologies introduced an integrated Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) solution inside a blade chassis. This single-chassis FCoE solution is based on IBM BladeCenter H equipped with BLADE's BNT Virtual Fabric 10G Switch Module and QLogic Virtual Fabric Extension Module and Converged Network Adapters.


BLADE's FCoE-ready switch is a key element of the company's Unified FabricArchitecture (UFA). The goal is to tie together best-of-breed servers, storage, hypervisors and core networking systems into a virtual machine aware data center networking platform.


The new solution converts CEE (Converged Enhanced Ethernet) packets to native Fibre Channel, so IBM BladeCenter customers can directly attach to their existing storage targets without any impact to their SAN infrastructure. The lossless, low-latency, low-power and low-cost BLADE switch performs at 10G line-rate throughput with no packet loss as required by Fibre FCoE and the CEE standards for open unified networking.


BLADE Network Technologies calculates that its integrated FCoE solution is 3x less expensive, 2x more energy efficient and requires no cabling between the switch and the gateway compared with external top-of-rack gateway designs. This switch for IBM BladeCenter consumes less power than a standard light bulb -- up to 75 percent less than external switches -- and supports BLADE's VMready software for Virtual Machine-aware networking.
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