Tech News - IBM Plans Blade Servers for End of Third Quarter

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IBM Plans Blade Servers for End of Third Quarter

04/25/2002

ARMONK, N.Y. (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp. later this year will join the fray of computer makers offering servers squeezed onto plug-and-play boards, aiming to sell blade computers around the end of the third quarter, IBM said ahead of a Thursday announcement.

IBM rivals Compaq Computer Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are already shipping the modules plug that look like oversized circuit boards and stand up vertically in special chassis, offering higher density and potentially easier maintenance than low-end rack-mounted servers.

Dell Computer Corp. also plans to sell blades.

Thomas Jarosh, vice president in IBM's server group, said ahead of the announcement that the blade market had not taken off yet, so that IBM had had time to learn from competitors' mistakes as it prepared its own version of the technology.

"We think that is a benefit. There hasn't been a lot of buying of systems," he said.

Manufacturers cite International Data Corp research company forecasts that blades will be a $3 billion market by 2005 but agree that tight corporate budgets have slowed early buying.

IBM's main competitor in the market for high-end servers running the Unix operating system, Sun Microsystems Inc., also plans to introduce blade servers in the second half of 2002 and aims to make blades that support both its own chips and ones with Intel-Corp. architecture, as well as its Unix platform and Linux.

The IBM blades will initially support the Linux and Microsoft Corp. Windows operating systems, consistent with competitors aiming to market blades for relatively light tasks, such as e-mail administration.

IBM will launch its blades with Intel Pentium 4 processors, but it intends to launch data storage blades in the fourth quarter and next year blades with its own Power 4 high-end processor and Intel's high-end Itanium chip, in a bid to move the blade architecture toward use for more demanding tasks.

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