More than a year ago, Intel began a technology-sharing relationship with IBM under which both vendors worked to develop standard building blocks for the ultra-dense, easily managed blade server architecture. Intel then selected about 40 system builders in North America to begin a slow rollout of its blade server components. Since then, the technology has gained wider acceptance in a variety of industries, Buddenbaum said.
"We are seeing it being deployed in a lot of different configurations," he said. "Blades are being used for compute farms, [high-performance computing] installations and, of course, the traditional enterprise. We are seeing it in small and medium-[size] businesses, and the branch-office space. We're really seeing acceptance spread across a variety of verticals."
B.J. Arun, chairman and CEO of California Digital, a Fremont, Calif.-based system builder that has been part of Intel's early blade server program, was also bullish on the Intel blade architecture.
Previously, blade solutions were built around proprietary, non-standard solutions by a variety of vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Dell, Arun said. Once installed, end users could only scale up or build onto existing blade systems using components from that same vendor due to compatibility issues.
"From a customer's perspective, it was negative because you got locked into one company's blade servers," Arun said. "If you wanted more, you had to go back to that company."
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