Blade.org Sets in Motion "Mega-Trends" That Will Address Data Center Challenges of the Future

NEW YORK, NY, Jun 19 (MARKET WIRE) --
Blade.org, the industry consortium driving open innovation in blade-based
solutions, today convened its inaugural Blade.org Technology Symposium to
launch the key "Mega-Trend" innovations that will influence how
organizations transform their data centers in the future.

At the Blade.org Technology Symposium today, visionary technologists from
Morgan Stanley, The Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at North
Carolina State University, GameVee.com and Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors
joined with leading suppliers of blade-based data center technology like
APC, BLADE Network Technologies, Brocade, Devon IT, Emulex, IBM, Intel,
NetApp, NetXen, QLogic, VirtenSys and VMware. These experts detailed the
emerging mega-trends of converged networks, advanced energy efficiency and
hyper consolidation, which will unify data center I/O on a single wire,
reduce energy waste and enable unprecedented data center densities.

Since its inception two years ago, more than 200 companies have joined
Blade.org to advance open innovation around blade server-based data
centers. The newest members announced today include MetLife, Morgan
Stanley and CBS Television. The consortium's additional membership
includes leading end-users from financial services, media and
entertainment and academia together with top IT vendors of data center
hardware and software, services and solutions.

Blade servers integrate servers, storage, networking and applications into
one system. These servers continue to outpace the rest of the server
market. According to IDC, the blade server market will reach customer
revenues of $11.8 billion by 2010.(1)

"Overall, blade servers are becoming increasingly important in the data
center, supporting key growth technologies like cloud computing, Software
as a Service (SaaS) and hosted services -- some of the hottest areas of
investment for Walden," said Andy Kau of Walden International and a member
of the Blade.org VC Advisory Council.

The mega-trends that blade.org believes will change the future of business
computing are:

Converged Networks: Today data centers use separate "input/output (I/O)
lanes" for data networking, storage traffic and inter-process
communications, each of which require their own adapters, connectors and
wires. In the future, data centers will converge I/O on Ethernet, running
all their traffic on a single "lane" or wire. This convergence is ideal
for blade environments because they are tightly packed together with
little room for extra components.

Key developments in converged networking include the collaboration between
BLADE Network Technologies, Emulex, NetApp and QLogic to pioneer Fibre
Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) for converged data and storage networks.

Advanced Energy Efficiency: Use of blade technology is anticipated to
represent more than 25 percent of server deployments by 2010. The need to
dissipate the heat generated by this highly power-dense technology must
keep pace; however, in recent years, traditional cooling system design has
proven inadequate to remove concentrated heat loads. In the future, data
centers will minimize energy use and reduce carbon footprint by turning to
such alternatives as water-cooled and/or container-based data centers and
close-to-chassis heat rejection that can eliminate much of the 45 percent
of electrical energy in the data center that is wasted by today's cooling
systems.

"Gartner states that in-rack and in-row cooling will emerge as the
predominant cooling strategy by 2011 for high-density equipment," said
Blade.org Technology Symposium presenter Jim Simonelli, chief technology
officer of APC. "This strategy closely couples the cooling unit to the
heat emanating from the rack or row of servers. The design eliminates
performance uncertainties and hot spots that exist -- especially when data
center professionals attempt to cool high density racks using a perimeter
cooling strategy. Row-oriented cooling also improves energy efficiency
since this approach reduces the distance cold air must travel to cool the
servers, resulting in reduced fan power -- the dominant source of
electrical energy consumption in a data center's cooling system."

"There will be a real focus at the server ingredient level to reduce power
requirements and improve energy efficiency while increasing performance,"
said Symposium presenter Rob Nance, Chief Architect, High Density
Computing Group for Intel. "The result will be that data center managers
can deploy more compute power in their existing facilities without
upgrading their infrastructures."

Hyper consolidation: Today data centers are focused on server
consolidation. In the future, clients will "hyper consolidate" servers,
workstations and network devices into an integrated blade environment. For
example, Blade.org member Devon IT's new approach to dense desktop
consolidation on blades achieves exceptional scalability, improved
security and tremendous power savings by consolidating desktops on blade
servers and delivering graphics and multimedia to the user directly from
blade installations.

Blade.org an Industry Pioneer

In a new academic paper from the Pennsylvania State University Department
of Management and Organization called "Blade.org: A Collaborative
Community of Firms," Professor Charles C. Snow writes, "Founded in early
2006, Blade.org, a successful community of member firms, was creatively
designed to emulate the characteristics and processes of a community of
individuals. We believe that the community-of-firms model is particularly
well suited to the pursuit of continuous innovation, and we expect to see
this organizational approach used increasingly as firms come to realize
the value to be gained from multi-firm collaboration both within and
across industries. Blade.org, the pioneer of this new approach, shows
that a community of firms can be a successful means of innovation, and
its role as a community facilitator is worthy of study and imitation."

New Blade User Portal

The Blade.org Customer Advisory Council is introducing a new portal at
http://www.bladeuser.org to serve as an information source for blade
server users. Bladeuser.org is an open portal that provides an online
forum for blade computing users to voice observations, ask questions and
make comments about blade configurations, products and services. The
Bladeuser.org mission is to give blade users a public and prominent voice
and to encourage user-to-user dialog and user-to-supplier interaction.
Initial forums will address topics including storage, virtualization and
power consumption.

"Blade.org provides an invaluable interchange between users of blade
servers and the vendor community," said Kyle Ohme, Chairman of the
Blade.org Customer Advisory Council. "Now that so many companies have
deployed blade servers, many blade users have expressed the desire to join
in a forum -- like those in many other product categories that enjoy
strong adoption -- in which they can interact with their peers as well as
the vendor community. Blade.org is becoming a diverse community where
vendors can transform end-users' needs for workarounds and custom
development into off-the-shelf blade server products and specialized data
center solutions."

About Blade.org

Blade.org is a collaborative vendor and end-user community focused on
accelerating the development and adoption of blade server solutions. The
organization provides leadership to the blade market and fosters a
thriving industry ecosystem focused on delivering valuable solutions to
blade computing users. For more information, visit http://www.blade.org.

(1) IDC: Worldwide Blade Server 2008-2011 Forecast and 2006 Vendor Share,
Doc # 210229, February 2008.

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Contact:
Zee Zaballos
ZNA Communications
+1.831.425.1581, ext. 201
pr@blade.org

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