IBM is looking to increase the appeal of its BladeCenter S by adding a shared-storage option and will integrate a SAN (storage area network) into the blade chassis. With this shared data storage option, IBM is looking to offer a competitive product to take on HPs c3000 blade enclosure offering. Both the IBM and HP blade enclosures are designed for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and remote offices.IBM is now offering a shared-storage
option with its BladeCenter S that will allow small and midsize businesses to
take advantage of up to 12TB of data storage within a blade enclosure.
On
a day when Hewlett-Packard acquired LeftHand Networks to boost its own storage
and virtualization options, IBM
announced Oct. 1 that its BladeCenter S will come equipped with its own SAN
(storage area network) that will offer up to 12TB of storage for SMBs or large
enterprises with branch offices. The SAN
with the BladeCenter S will use SAS (serial-attached SCSI) drives, which are
less expensive that external SAN
configurations that use Fibre Channel.
While small businesses might not need the type of data storage capacity that
a 12TB SAN offers, IBM
is betting that some customers might want to consolidate some storage equipment
into a single blade chassis.
If those companies are looking to make their IT systems as efficient and
cost-effective as possible, integrated shared storage is a handy tool to help
achieve those ends, Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, wrote in
an Oct. 1 research note. IBMs new
SAS-based SAN can allow companies to deploy
and consolidate applications that leverage stored common resources (think
databases and similar business assets) onto BladeCenter S enclosures."
The new blade SAN also allows IBM
to offer a unique blade chassis to compete against similar offerings that HP
has made with its c3000 enclosure called Shorty. IBM
and HP control the vast majority of the worldwide
blade server market, and SMBs are seen as the next area where both
companies want to expand their blade businesses.
The SAN within the BladeCenter S chassis
will allow businesses to take advantage of some technology, such as
virtualization and database applications, that require shared storage compared with
dedicated storage configurations. The SAN
can also be set up to support a number of RAID configurations, including RAID
0, 1, 5 and 10.
For SMBs, the BladeCenter S uses standard 110-volt power supplies and can
plug into a typical office wall socket.
Pricing for the IBM BladeCenter S chassis
starts at $2,599, and the SAN configuration
will be available later this month.
Data Storage, Data Backup and Storage Virtualization 
