Quoting Processor.com

First developed as a way to pack more computing power in less space, blade servers allow IT staff to consolidate servers, shrinking cost of deployment and ownership by lowering complexity. Blade servers also enable IT managers to perform centralized management, increase reliability, and reduce cabling complexity.

According to Hitachi, it has rolled out the industry’s first enterprise-class blade server, which the company claims can support mission-critical, enterprise-level computing needs. The server can also lower ownership costs for users by increasing scalability and flexibility. The server is part of Hitachi’s BladeSymphony family and includes Virtage, an embedded virtualization feature that builds virtualization directly into the server’s hardware. This embedded virtualization software offers a different option than third-party virtual machine software.

BladeSymphony supports both Itanium and Xeon and can run either Microsoft Windows or Linux. The product also supports industry-standard PCI cards, allowing organizations to protect their investment in existing technologies. The unit is expandable, including processor cores, I/O slots, memory, and other components. The server also includes SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) interconnect technology, which lets customers configure multiple blades to work in concert as a single system.

While there are several companies that manufacture blade servers, including Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com), Dell (www.dell.com), HP (www.hp.com), and IBM (www.ibm.com), the Hitachi BladeSymphony stands alone among the competition because the server features embedded virtualization software, freeing customers from having to purchase third-party VMware (www.vmware.com).

“BladeSymphony with Virtage brings enterprise-class computing to a blade form factor for the first time. Its most important features include its flexible, scale-up/scale-out infrastructure, a unique backplane, and Virtage, an embedded virtualization feature. With Virtage, virtualization is baked right into the blade’s firmware, which enables customers to avoid the costs and hassles associated with third-party virtualization software,” says Steve Camp-bell, vice president of marketing for the Server Systems Group for Hitachi North America. “In short, BladeSymphony with Virtage combines the benefits of blade servers—small footprint and power and space efficiency—with mission-critical computing, high-performance computing, and the RAS features required to support mission-critical enterprise workloads in a single 10U product.” The BladeSymphony product will ship in North America sometime this month.

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