By Cassimir Medford

Blade Network Technologies began shipping the blade version of its 10 Gigabit Ethernet (1OGE) switch for IBM’s BladeCenter chassis Monday, hoping to steal some market share from Cisco Systems with a cheaper cost.

The Santa Clara, California-based company, which in February 2006 went from being a switch unit of troubled Nortel Networks to the joint property of Garnett & Helfrich Capital (60 percent), Nortel (25 percent), and Blade’s staff, said its switch will break new ground price-wise.

“We have achieved twice the performance of the Cisco Catalyst 6500, which is the industry de facto platform,” said Vikram Mehta, chief executive of Blade. “We have twice the performance, nine times better latency, at 15 times better price-performance.”

Demand for high-performance computing products and services is being driven by the rapid emergence of bandwidth-hogging services such as video-on-demand, IPTV, heavy-duty financial applications, and online gaming.

The convergence of voice over IP, data, and video on common IP networks is also driving the move to blade devices as opposed to traditional systems for cost, power consolidation, and cooling reasons.

“Most of these users had to bring in expensive and proprietary technologies such as Infiniband because standard 10-gigabit Ethernet was either not available or expensive,” Mr. Mehta said. “We have made that technology affordable and mainstream.”

Infiniband is a switched communications technology used in high-demand computing applications.

The company said its 10-gigabit Ethernet switch costs the user $24 per gigabit per second (Gbps) compared with $375 per Gbps for the Cisco Catalyst 6509.

The Tolly Group conducted side-by-side tests of the Blade and Cisco products and backed up most of the claims made by Blade. Tolly said Cisco was invited to but did not participate in the tests.

Blade’s 20-port Nortel Layer 2/3 10Gb ESM will ship from IBM for its BladeCenter H in February 2007, priced at $9,799.

Power Consumption

Heat generation and power consumption have become major issues in the corporate computing world, but much of the blame for that has been centered on the growing server farms, Mr. Mehta said. The majority of blame should instead be laid at the doorstep of the accompanying networking equipment such as switches, he added.

“They take up as much space, generate as much heat, and consume as much if not more power,” Mr. Mehta said.

“Embedding high-performance networking technology in the [IBM] BladeCenter cuts space utilization in half and power consumption by 80 percent, and runs far cooler than traditional network technology,” he concluded.