Intel focuses on blades

Looking to help its manufacturers compete in the blade server market, Intel is introducing a new family of products. Last week at the Intel Developer Forum, Intel announced a new blade server product family that it will sell to tier-two server manufacturers. 

Consisting of a chassis, dual processor blades, Gigabit Ethernet switches, Fibre Channel switches, and server management and provisioning software from Veritas, the new product family is Intel’s first foray into blade servers.

Patrick Buddenbaum, blades product line manager for the enterprise platform group at Intel, believes the blade server market is poised to grow beyond front-end Web servers and into the midrange and back-end, serving more robust applications likes databases and ERP.

Buddenbaum explains that the components that make up the family were co-designed with IBM and that Intel will now begin selling all the elements as an unbranded white box to its OEMs — something Intel has done for a while with its regular servers.

“We’ve been in this business for five to eight years,” said Buddenbaum. “Moving into the blade server market is new.”

Aiding Intel’s new push is storage software vendor Veritas. Troy Toman, senior director of product management for utility computing at Veritas, said Intel will bundle Veritas’s OpForce software with its new family of blade servers. The software, introduced in June, makes it possible for administrators to provision servers on the fly, manage servers that are active or in reserve, and allocate new servers as application demands change.

“Intel felt, for a blade server environment, this software is required,” added Toman. “Intel evaluated our software and recognized the value.” Intel will bundle the software with its blade server offering and is looking to add Itanium-based products to the family.