Intelligent Enterprise

IBM plans to release in October blade servers with integrated software for building data warehouses on a grid-computing environment.

The Information Server Blade, unveiled Monday at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, comprises IBM's blade hardware and the Information Server data integration software platform. The new product is designed for data integration projects that include data warehousing for business intelligence.

Information Server software has long been used in grid-computing environments. One corporation, which IBM did not name, used a cluster of Information Server Blades at a cost of about $300,000 for data warehousing. The system ran on 24 Intel microprocessors, according to IBM.

The new blades run Red Hat Linux and are built on IBM BladeCenter HS21 servers with dual-core Intel Xeon processors. To ease management and enhance grid and virtualization capabilities, Information Server Blades use IBM's Systems Director portfolio to provide a centralized dashboard to discover and manage workloads and virtual machines within the pooled environment.

For integrated grid management, IBM offers Tivoli Workload Scheduler LoadLeveler, which provides workload throughput and utilization of resources within grid clusters. IBM also plans to offer within the Information Server software platform industry-specific models that incorporate best practices in data. Targeted industries includes banking, retail, telecommunications, and insurance.

Information Server Blades are scheduled for release worldwide in October. The hardware and integrated software will be available through IBM or its partners.