A.H. Rajani writes a rather cynical post about IBM’s advertising for a new server product line, the eServer Bladecenter.

IBM Gone Wild

IBM, whose commercials are so ’sophisticated’ they usually forget to tell customers what they are selling, is advertising a new line of servers. At first they lament on how most businesses have at least one room called a server graveyard … [instead] buy a server that is the SIZE OF A FRIDGE which–not surprisingly–promises to be the last you’ll ever need

Hehe … look at the pictures on Rajani’s site for an idea of what the advert is about. I think Rajani misses the point of the product - it’s a bladecenter, and it’s designed to be extensible in that you can add a new processing module (effectively a new server itself) into the “chassis” (this is the fridge-sized bit) when you need to add more server capacity. It’s not really much different in concept to adding a new server to a rack, except that the bladecenter provides a lot of services that add a lot more value above and beyond a simple rack system. Blades themselves are hot-swappable (dynamically add more capacity when required !!!). Quite cool technology really.

From IBM’s website: BladeCenter: Blade servers

Slim, hotswappable blade servers fit in a single chassis like books in a bookshelf — and each is an independent server, with its own processors, memory, storage, network controllers, operating system and applications. The blade server simply slides into a bay in the chassis and plugs into a mid- or backplane, sharing power, fans, floppy drives, switches, and ports with other blade servers.

The benefits of the blade approach will be obvious to anyone tasked with running down hundreds of cables strung through racks just to add and remove servers. With switches and power units shared, precious space is freed up — and blade servers enable higher density with far greater ease.

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