Rackable clears ICE Cube shipping containers for IBM blades

Rackable is opening its white trash data centers to an outside guest for the first time. The company's ICE Cube modular data centers will now accommodate IBM's BladeCenter systems. How hospitable.

The companies have agreed to offer IBM's BladeCenter T and HT blade systems for Rackable's containers. Both models are NEBS-3 (Network Equipment Building Level 3) and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) compliant, which means they're certified for heavy-duty telecom environments and don't need much of the velvet glove.

In fact, they're designed to landscape oil fields or remote construction sites, where Rackable sees a lot of demand for IT equipment on the run. The plucky server start-up was one of the first to shill portable data centers on the coattails of Sun Microsystems — and the market has apparently taken off well. Now the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Verari, and yes, IBM are in on the game.

But unlike IBM and HP, which are fine with piecing any third-party vendor's metal into their own packages, Rackable has previously only allowed its own specially designed rack-mounted servers inside.

There are power and cooling benefits to custom designs, but then, some customers with specific hardware needs must look elsewhere.

Hence:

"Rackable Systems sees this strategic relationship as further opportunity to provide our customers with unique, built-to-order solutions," stated Mark Barrenechea, CEO of Rackable. "Including IBM BladeCenter on ICE Cube enables Rackable to expand its market reach to new customers, new fault tolerant workloads and new markets requiring NEBS-compliant products."

Rackable says BladeCenter-specific configurations will allow customers to get a maximum density of 1,344 dual socket, Quad-core Xeon blades; or 672 quad socket, dual-core AMD Opteron blades in the box. The ICE Cube containers are available in 20 or 40 foot container sizes.

The hardware combo is available now worldwide through Rackable. ®