IBM BladeCenter Open Fabric

IBM BladeCenter® Open Fabric is an integrated server I/O portfolio that offers an open, high performance and comprehensive set of interconnects and smart management tools to help run your business. Integrated across all blades, switches and chassis, BladeCenter Open Fabric supports open standards and industry interoperability across 5 I/O fabrics, including Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, Ethernet, iSCSI and Serial attached SCSI (SAS) helping to simplify blade I/O management and deployment so you can concentrate on realizing innovation in your business.

At the heart of IBM's I/O strategy, IBM BladeCenter® Open Fabric Manager is designed to help you manage growth and complexity by making it easy to manage I/O and network interconnects for up to 100 BladeCenter chassis up to 1400 blade servers. BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager helps make blade deployment EASY: once Installed, the utility is resident in the Advanced Management Module (AMM) so you can pre-configure LAN and SAN connections. Thus, I/O connections are made automatically when you plug in a blade. And no special tools or training is required; just manage with the easy-to-use GUI.

In contrast to typical competitive tools that only support a small number of proprietary blades and switches, BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager is OPEN and allows you to manage a wide range of industry Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches Cisco, Nortel, Brocade, QLogic.

BladeCenter Open Fabric Manager is the RIGHT CHOICE now and into the future. The software can even be deployed on existing hardware through a firmware upgrade, helping you protect your current BladeCenter investments and giving you the flexibility to deploy precisely the solution you need to help your business realize innovation. Manage risk with an optional upgrade which provides a standalone utility to enable workload virtualization allowing you to define action plans that can automatically execute based on customer-defined trigger events. If the trigger event occurs, a blade in the predefined pool will automatically receive I/O parameters and take over for the original blade. This OS independent tool is an EASY and OPEN way to virtualize your blade servers.