40Gbps, The Next Frontier For Servers Says Network Specialist

We caught up with Charles Ferland, vice President of BLADE Network technologies to discuss about the company's plans, the strategic partnership it announced with IBM and the future of GbE networking technology worldwide.

1) Mr. Ferland, Can you first and foremost present BLADE Network Technologies to our readers?

BLADE Network technologies (BLADE), the data centre Ethernet switching company, was established as a privately held company in 2006. Today, BLADE is the industry’s number-two supplier of data centre Ethernet switches, with more than 9 million ports installed. BLADE’s 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet blade server and top-of-rack switches bring intelligence and speed to the edge of the network where it’s closer to business applications, users and innovation. BLADE products provide the superior performance, ultra-low latency and virtual machine awareness that is ideally suited to handle dynamic demands at the network edge, from private and public clouds to financial services and other HPC applications. BLADE’s lossless, low-latency, low-cost and low-power RackSwitch switches; VMready network virtualisation and BLADE Harmony switch management, connect and unify physical and virtual servers, storage and networks in the world’s largest data centres. BLADE’s Unified Fabric Architecture is a fast, virtual, proven and interoperable converged fabric that provides a roadmap for today’s 1/10 G Ethernet network to tomorrow’s 40/100 G Ethernet environments.

2) One of the company's recent announcements has to do with the adoption of BLADE’s hardware by IBM, can you tell us more about it?

BLADE has been IBMs’ trusted partner for over seven years. Most recently, IBM selected BLADE’s RackSwitch 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches for inclusion in the IBM System x option portfolio. BLADE’s RackSwitch products provide enterprise data centre networking capabilities for IBM System x, including IBM Virtual Fabric, BLADE’s VMready Virtual Machine-aware networking and lossless DCB/CEE networking. In addition to BLADE’s embedded switch products, which are widely deployed Ethernet switches for IBM BladeCenter, IBM has offered BLADE’s RackSwitch as an option for iDataPlex and Cluster 1350 for more than two years. Since April 2008 IBM is expanding its popular RackSwitch offering to make the BLADE switches available for all IBM System x servers including the best-selling x3550 and x3650 rack servers and the new eX5 enterprise systems, as well as to provide an up-stream networking solution for IBM BladeCenter.