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IBM's IBM Blade Center HS40, a four-way blade server powered by Intel Xeon chips, will soon be available. IBM plans to announce later in 1Q2004 the general availability of IBM BladeCenter JS20, the first blade server to run IBM's 64-bit, 1.6GHz PowerPC 970 chips. IBM started its blade launches about a year ago and was the market leader by the end of 3Q2003. IBM's sales surpassed those of Hewlett- Packard (HP) and Dell in blade shipments and revenue. Big Blue is now looking at more storage, management software, and switching options for BladeCenter systems. Susan Whitney, general manager of IBM Intel-based eServer xSeries systems, says customers have indicated that they want to buy an infrastructure architecture. IBM has also been using blade technology as a primary tool in its infrastructure simplification initiative, which connects IBM blades with IBM zSeries mainframes to decrease data center complexity. BladeCenter HS40 is powered by Intel 2.8GHz Xeon MP chips and will provide 1MB of cache. The system will follow the release of the first four-way blade (HP ProLiant BL40p by a year), but the HS40 will be more dense. A spokesman for Interland, which plans to use blade technology, says IBM's design, which allows integration of devices including switches and firewalls onto the blades, eases consolidation.
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