IBM's BladeCenter ecosystem has gotten a little larger, and IBM officials say companies including CipherOptics, Cisco, Nominum, QLogic and SANRAD will introduce new blades and solutions for IBM eServer BladeCenter. This expanding ecosystem is helping IBM quickly address customer needs with new products based on the open specification of BladeCenter.

Since IBM and Intel opened the BladeCenter specification in September, more than 260 companies have secured the BladeCenter specification. Further, more than 350 technology and solution partners are part of the BladeCenter Alliance Program.

IBM and Cisco are collaborating with the intent to deliver an Open Standards based end-to-end iSCSI solution for BladeCenter. This solution will incorporate Quality of Service and security features and will utilize Cisco's data and storage networking intelligence to connect BladeCenter to iSCSI or fiber channel storage devices.

IBM and Cisco have defined two reference architectures to support a variety of workloads, one for web, file or print serving and the other for transaction processing. Together, IBM and Cisco intend to deliver an iSCSI environment that allows customers to extend their existing TCP/IP and Ethernet investments to the storage area network.

Also, QLogic Corp., a provider of iSCSI host bus adapters (HBA) and member of the BladeCenter Alliance Program, has announced it would provide its QLogic iSCSI expansion card for BladeCenter. The iSCSI adapter is powered by a single-chip TCP/IP and iSCSI offload engine designed to deliver user-friendly, high performance storage networking while preserving CPU In addition, several companies are announcing new blades built to the BladeCenter open specification.

SANRAD, a provider of intelligent IP storage networking, has developed a new storage switch for BladeCenter based on the open specification.

CipherOptics, a provider of multigigabit-speed Internet protocol security (IPsec) encryption technology used to secure data in motion, has announced that it will develop an IPsec encryption blade for IBM BladeCenter. The initial CipherOptics BladeCenter solution will support data encryption speeds of up to 1.9 gigabits at wire speed, with virtually no latency and completely transparent to the network. With this solution IBM customers can now protect their data with little or no impact on their applications.

Nominum, a provider of IP address infrastructure solutions, will deliver a new blade offering that combines its carrier grade DNS and DHCP solutions with BladeCenter to meet customers' growing network demands. The new, scalable solution will enable server consolidation and is designed for telecommunications companies and service providers.