News

posted on 22 February 2008 09:20

NetApp has joined blade technology association Blade.org as a governing member signalling the importance it attaches to having its storage products work with blade servers.

The other directors of Blade.org are:-

-- Douglas Balog, IBM
-- Daniel Cohen, Brocade
-- Vikram Karvat, NetXen
-- Adam Mendoza, NetApp
-- Shailesh Naik, Blade Network Technologies
-- Ken Pierrehumbert, APCC
-- Jason Waxman, Intel

Adam Mendoza is NetApp's senior manager for the Virtualization and Grid Infrastructures business unit. One of his main duties is the development of a virtualization strategy and portfolio that utilizes blade server architectures and provide reference architectures that customers can leverage and adopt. He is also responsible for the development of strategic alliances with leading technology companies that jointly focus on the business, technology, and operational considerations for next-generation data center environments.

Brocade has recently introduced its Data Centre Swirch (DCX) product. IBM has a prominent blade server portfolio. HP is not a governming member despite having a very successful blade server line. In fact it is not a member at all.

NetApp recently teamed with other Blade.org members Blade Network Technologies and Chelsio Communications on a collaborative study through Blade.org demonstrating that blade servers equipped with embedded 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking can support large-scale business applications at near wire speeds in consolidated blade server architectures by using NetApp Ethernet and IP networked storage.

Adam Mendoza offered this opinion on NetApp joining the organisation: "Blade.org was founded upon a spirit of collaboration and exemplifies the dedication that is necessary in order to create solutions that span all elements of blade server architectures, and the organization is proving to be a tremendous vehicle for NetApp and other Blade.org members in accelerating the adoption of blade server architectures. Customers who are considering blade server architectures want to adopt this technology to help them reduce their power, space, and cooling requirements. They also have a critical need to adopt associated operational disciplines for data protection, data movement, and migration based upon a set of standard best practices and tools."

Doug Balog, chairman of Blade.org and VP of development for blades and modular systems at IBM, was pleased: "We are pleased to welcome NetApp as a governing board member. NetApp is exemplary of the Blade.org vendor members that have joined together to support the variety of customer environments made possible with blade servers. To help Blade.org further accelerate the adoption of blade servers, NetApp brings best practices and tools for data protection, data movement and migration, and more importantly, vast experience with large-scale, next-generation blade-server-based data centers."

Whether NetApp will develop blade-based storage products is open to question. Miniaturisation of storage could progress to the point where vertically-mounted blades holding, say, 2.5-inch disks could be used instead of horizontal rack units. The probable dense packing of such blades will bring power and cooling problems to be solved.

Flash solid state disks (SSD) though would solve these issues and we might see here a harbinger of vertically-mounted flash SSD blades being the future building block of storage arrays.