IBM's business intelligence blade

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IBM announced its Information Server Blade from LinuxWorld this week

IBM logoThe new IBM Information Server Blade is a completely integrated offering comprised of IBM blade hardware, the IBM Information Server data integration software platform, and implementation services including financing. …

Designed for all types of challenging data integration projects including consolidations, mergers and acquisitions, business intelligence or data warehousing, IBM Information Server Blade leverages the dynamic nature of grid computing with the flexibility of blade computing and virtualization technologies to access and translate large quantities of information stored across an enterprise.

And in a sign that Sun is making inroads against Big Blue, they reference a Sun replacement installation in their press release

…a major corporation used a cluster of Information Server Blades at a cost around $300,000 running 24 Intel microprocessors to crunch through a massive data warehousing job in 45 minutes. Previously, when the job was run on a $3 million Sun server, the data integration job took them five and a half hours.

The system runs Red Hat and is built around IBM BladeCenter HS21 servers with Xeon processors. I believe that we’ll see more of this type of vertically integrated, plug-and-play HPC in the enterprise space as vendors move in to capitalize on these new customers by making things as easy as possible for them.