IBM Information Server Blade tackles data integration

IBM is cooking up a server blade that combines grid computing and virtualization to aid consolidating massive amounts of information across a business.

The appliance, revealed at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, is dubbed the IBM Information Server Blade.

The appliance is a marriage between the IBM BladeCenter HS21 servers running Red Hat Linux with the company's Information Server data integration software. The result is an appliance that uses data virtualization to allow access to disparately sited data without the user needing to know where it is physically stored.

The Information Server Blade uses the IBM Systems Director portfolio to provide a centralized dashboard to manage workloads as well as physical and virtual machines within the pooled environment. It also utilizes Tivoli Workload Manager to enable workload-monitoring across blades.

"Unlike traditional approaches to large-scale data integration projects that typically consume significant system resources, require multiple software programs, and countless hours of processing time, the IBM Information Server Blade supports rapid data movement to deliver a consolidated, enterprise-wide view of information," the company said in a press release.

The blade doesn't come cheap, however. A minimum configuration of a 1U module, consisting of three blades, Information Server software and implementation services costs $330,000. Additional blades with software goes for $90,000. According to IBM, the module will be available in October. ®