BLADE Network Technologies, Inc. (BLADE), the leading provider of network switching infrastructure for blade servers, announced the publication of a Blade Network Technologies sponsored IDC white paper that identifies the third cycle of evolution of blade servers marked by the deployment of mission-critical, high-bandwidth compute and storage applications on blades (1). The whitepaper describes how companies can realize a number of benefits by adopting Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) blade server switches -- including reduced latency, environmental savings (space, power, and cooling), lower Total Cost of Ownership, simplified management and much more. The paper also describes how 10GE blade server switches will facilitate the roll out of value-added services such as VoIP and IPTV/Video-On-Demand from service providers.

BLADE's integrated blade server switches also help to alleviate the cabling, power, space and cooling challenges faced by most enterprise datacenters. For example, the IDC whitepaper "Making the Business Case for Blade Switches" cites that blade server switches offer an improvement in power consumption over external switches, consuming between 25 and 65 watts compared with external switches that typically consume 300 watts or more.

Written by IDC analysts Lucinda Borovick and John Humphreys, the IDC white paper states, "Blade server switches provide an effective platform for virtualization. The blade server switch allows enterprises to bring network intelligence back into a virtual server deployment." To download the whitepaper in its entirety, please visit http://www.bladenetwork.net/.