IBM, Intel open blade switch specs

IBM switches are already superior to HP

.. for certain things at leat, such as Web and High Availabiity.

When we purchased our blade chassis we looked into all the options from Sun, HP, Dell and IBM, and out of all of them IBM was the only one that offered a switch with layer 2/7 features, for load balancing and offloading etc.

Common switches a good idea but unlikely.

It would be great if I could take an IBM switch and plug it into an HP chassis, and vice versa, especially as the majority of the blades switche modules are from the same sources (Brocade, CISCO and Nortel) and even share common core components, but I can't see it happening for two reasons.

The first is that these blades are built to a cost, having tracks, chips and connectors to provide connectiviy for x number of blades in a chassis. The problem here is all the vendors put different numbers of blades in their respective chassis, and then have different points at which the blade connects through to the backplane and the backplane connects through to the switch module. If vendor A has a chassis that has the backplane connectors horizontally in the middle for fourteen blades, but the new common design has vertical middle connectors for sixteen blades, then vendor A has to pay out for a redesign of the backplane and then accept the additional cost per switch module for two sets of conenctions they will never use. This is even before we consider that if vendor A's design has a superior feature that can't be carried across to a common design then they are effectively surrendering an advantage that may be a core reason for their sales, for the limited benefit of a commonality feature that would in effect make it easier for IBM to attack them.

The second is that these switch modules interct in different ways with proprietary firmware in the chassis, so a change of module design may also reauire a complete rewrite of your chassis firmware, and again may force a vendor to give up a superior feature for the dubious added value of commonality.

So in short, seeing as the connections onwards from the different switch modules are all common standards (UTP cabling, FC cabling, etc), it seems like the market is fine with propreitary switches. If IBM was the market leader and had some stellar advantage in their designs then I could see a market push for other vendors to agree a common switch module standard, but at present IBM is not the market leader and they do not have any feature I've seen that gave them anything like the driver necessary for the market to start screaming at HP, Dell and FSC to comply. The only likely taker I can see is Sun as they would actually gain from handing over a chunk of design control to IBM given IBM's superior market position and Sun's linited engineering ability.