Blade targets datacentres with RackSwitch updates

Networking hardware firm Blade Network Technologies has launched a series of products which it claims can cut datacentre costs and improve performance.

The RackSwitch G8124 is the first "pure-play" top-of-rack switch to offer lossless Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) enhancements, the firm said.

The switch offers a 10 Gigabit Ethernet 24-port barrier for CEE-capable switches, and is available for US$11,950, which the firm claims makes it the first to offer each port for less than US$500.

Tim Shaughnessy, vice president of marketing at Blade Network Technologies, estimated that the RackSwitch G8124 could enable companies to reduce networking costs by up to 50 percent, cabling costs by up to 90 percent and energy costs by up to 50 percent.

"RackSwitch enables enterprises to take an open approach to unifying their data and storage networks with less disruption and at a far lower cost than hybrid top-of-rack," he said.

"This enables enterprises to deploy high-performance IP storage and prepare for Fibre Channel over Ethernet while reducing networking costs."

The company also announced that its existing VMready Ethernet switches now offer scalability to thousands of virtual machines, in a move designed to optimise datacentre performance, availability and efficiency.

Shaughnessy explained that the new VMready switches offer many benefits as network vendors change their approach to equipping datacentre networks for the demands of virtualisation.

"Blade Network Technologies offers datacentres a new, open and automated system that does not consume server overhead, slow down network performance, require proprietary packet tagging that works only in VMware environments or necessitate an expensive overhaul of existing VMware environments," he said.