Chalk another one up for speculation. Those of you intimately involved with the Apple and/or IBM server community have probably seen the dust IBM is kicking up over Mark Papermaster. Uh, who? Papermaster, until recently, was the head of IBM’s blade server division. After 20 years of black coats and red ties, he opted for t-shirts and Birkenstocks by taking a gig at Apple. Apparently, Mr. Papermaster had forgotten the ‘no-compete’ agreement he signed with IBM, thus preventing him from working for a competitor for at least one year. IBM is sueing Papermaster for committing such a no-no.
I think the real story here is, why does Apple want a blade server-guru? The XServe was a decent server platform. Now that Apple has made the move to Intel processors, they need something other than OSX to push further into the heavily competitive server market. Does this mean we’re going to see an Apple blade platform? This might be terribly interesting as a cluster platform.
For more details on this speculation and the Papermaster stink, read the full article here.
Actually, the situation has been recently clarified (a bit), and it appears that Mark Papermaster will lead the iPod division:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Apples_iPod_chief_steps_down_iPhone_sales_outlook_follows_suit/1225826079
So, no iBlades for now.
Thanks for the update kilian. Our speculation was way off on this one