"BLADE achieved record-breaking business performance in 2009 fueled by strong demand from the world's largest enterprises for our low-latency, low-power, lossless and low-cost Ethernet fabric switches, Advanced Fabric software and Smart Server Control software", stated Vikram Mehta, president and CEO, BLADE Network Technologies. "As customers address their key issues in terms of unifying and simplifying their data centre architectures, they are invariably concerned with vendor lock in, expense and anything that requires them to rip out and replace their existing systems. BLADE's Unified FabricArchitecture is a faster, virtual machine aware and proven data centre networking platform that allows customers to tie together best-of-breed servers, storage, hypervisors and core networking systems. Our Unified FabricArchitecture and Rackonomics approach ensure that customers that have already invested billions of dollars in their data centres can take advantage of the best innovations in the industry and achieve the lowest possible cost of ownership for their IT infrastructure."

"This BLADE announcement is simultaneously timely and relevant as enterprises recognize the value of convergence at the network edge", stated Steve O’Donnell, managing director and senior analyst, ESG (Enterprise Strategy Group) EMEA. "Modern network architects are leveraging the simplicity and cost effectiveness of modular top of rack designs to deliver flexible wire once solutions that do not need expensive and disruptive upgrades to their core LAN and SAN."

"Enterprise data centres worldwide are actively upgrading to 10 Gigabit Ethernet and implementing I/O virtualization for servers and storage but are concerned about preserving their existing IT investments", stated Philip Dawson, vice president, Gartner. "A unified IP network fabric can serve to ensure that the data centre network can deliver maximum business value and flexibility."

"Today's enterprise data centre is pursuing dual yet potentially conflicting goals to unify their server, storage and networking environment and to avoid tying their fortunes to a single vendor", stated John Abbott, chief analyst, The 451 Group. "BLADE's Unified FabricArchitecture provides an independent network platform that enables the enterprise data centre to achieve unification without vendor lock-in."

BLADE's UFA brings together some of the industry's most proven technology and IT elements into a very compelling solution. These elements include:

1. BLADEOS - The world's most widely deployed data centre fabric OS with 7.5 million ports in production deployment. Over 9,500 enterprises in the world have deployed this fabric OS in their data centres, including 350 of the Fortune 500 companies. The company's customers include 7 of the top 10 companies in the Global 500 list, 5 of the top 10 media companies, 13 of the world's top 25 banks, 4 of the world's top 10 telecommunications companies, 6 of the top 10 global electronics companies, one of the world's largest stock exchanges that conducts over $30 trillion in annual trade over this fabric, the world's largest Ethernet supercomputer cluster and the market-leading and largest Internet search engine in China.

2. VMready - Network virtualization extensions to BLADEOS that make it ideally suited for customers who are deploying server virtualization in their data centres. BLADE's VMready is hypervisor agnostic, does not require customers to upgrade to the latest version of hypervisor software and ships standard with every 10GE blade switch. This software stack lies at the heart of some of the world's largest virtual server deployments including Centre Hospitalier d'Avignon – a public health care organisation providing health care to people for over 600 years.

3. vNIC - Converged fabric extensions to BLADEOS that allow customers to converge their LAN, SAN and management networks onto a single wire. vNIC is open and supports everything from mainframes to rack optimized servers to tower systems to purpose built application appliances (e.g. data warehousing, security, etc.) from multiple vendors.

4. Smart Server Control - The industry's most sophisticated server control and CMDB software that presently provides environmental, configuration, I/O and provisioning control for over one million blade servers deployed in data centres around the world.

5. FabricHarmony - Data centre fabric element management software that allows customers to effectively manage the BLADE data centre fabric elements and cohesively integrate them into a data centre-wide management system of their choice (IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, CA UniCenter, HP OpsWare, IBM Director, etc.).

6. High reliability - The fabric of a data centre is critical to system and data centre uptime. The actual measured MTBF on BLADE's data centre fabric elements is well over 3 million hours.

7. Data center focus - Unlike most other networking vendors, BLADE is singularly focused on the data centre fabric market. As a result, BLADE has created the world's best Ethernet data center fabric as measured by performance and throughput, latency, loss characteristics and price-performance.

8. Partnerships - BLADE recognizes that customers want their problems solved but don't wish to be held hostage by closed and proprietary systems from a single vendor. As a result, BLADE has designed its fabric to be open, to embrace existing and new systems and allow customers to take advantage of the best innovations available in the market that deliver the lowest cost of ownership.

This powerful roadmap takes BLADE's UFA well into this decade and includes:

1. Silicon innovations - with the industry's leading providers of merchant switch silicon to embed functions in an ASIC that will enable customers to improve the performance and efficiency of network and I/O intensive applications such as security, data warehousing and rich media (HD/3D) content distribution.

2. Rack infrastructure - rapid provisioning and control - BLADE is actively working to add extensions to its Smart Server Control software to provide environmental, configuration, I/O and provisioning control for different server form factors in a multi-vendor environment.

3. Extreme reliability - BLADE will extend its reliability advantages into innovations that will dramatically reduce the operating expense associated with data centre infrastructure.

4. 40GE and 100GE innovations - BLADE is working to enhance the performance of its fabric products to 40GE and 100GE speeds and extend the scaling characteristics of its fabric through the implementation of the Distributed Fabric Protocol (DFP), a BLADE invention.