IBM Updates Blade Management Tools

[Sunite]

IBM Updates Blade Management Tools
By Richard Koman
November 19, 2007 12:35PM

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With Open Fabric Manager, IBM competes with HP's Virtual Connect offering, said analyst Joe Clabby, who explained that HP's solution uses a hardware module to mask blade server addresses from external networks, while IBM's Open Fabric Manager relies on a software approach that integrates blades with external networks.

Related Topics
   IBM
   BladeCenter
   HP
   Servers
   Storage
   Virtualization

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   IBM has released a new blade configuration tool as part of its BladeCenter product line. The BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager allows administrators to control I/O virtualization across 1,400 individual blades from a single log-on.

The manager supports a wide range of blade "fabrics," from vendors such as Brocade, Blade Network Technologies, Cisco, and others. IBM said that this open approach will allow small and midsize businesses to increase performance and save money by using existing switch technology and preserving investments.

"For most customers, the pain points with blades is managing the power and managing the complexity," said Stuart McRae, product line manager for BladeCenter. "When you had one application with one server, it didn't take that much to replace. Now, with multiple workloads on a blade server, customers need an extra layer of automation in that environment."

Automatic Mapping Saves Days

The technology address a critical pain point, Joe Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics, wrote in a research note for Pund-IT. To provision and configure blades, administrators need to assign and manage a myriad of access control addresses and identifiers, a monumental task in large-scale environments, he explained.

With Open Fabric Manager, Clabby said, "IBM has found a way to mix data and storage into a common virtual pool of I/O resources that can be shared across a set of blade servers." So, instead of having to physically map blades to external networks, IBM now does the mapping automatically.

The result is that "blade managers can cut configuration time down from days to minutes," Clabby said.

Approach for the Future

With Open Fabric Manager, IBM competes with HP's Virtual Connect offering, but, said Clabby, the two solutions are very different. HP's solution uses a hardware module to mask blade server addresses from external LAN and SAN networks, Clabby said. IBM's is more a software-based management approach that integrates blades with external networks.

IBM's solution is differentiated by its open approach to third-party network switches, for example. "Because IBM has so many third-party vendors in its portfolio -- and because HP does not -- the level of HP's Virtual Connect integration Relevant Products/Services with other vendors' management environments is not as feature-function rich as the IBM offerings," Clabby said.

The pricing of IBM's offering is also "significantly less" than HP's, Clabby added. "I believe that systems and storage management will ultimately merge under the control of the same administrators," he concluded. "IBM's approach is more in keeping with the way that blades will likely be managed in the future."