IBM BladeCenter servers now shipping in ICE Cube

Rackable Systems, Inc. entered into an agreement with IBM to offer IBM’s BladeCenter servers inside its ICE Cube modular data centers.

As part of this agreement, IBM BladeCenter will be the only blade server platform available for custom ICE Cubes. Prior to this agreement, Rackable’s containerized data centers only supported Rackable’s own server hardware.

IBM also started offering its own containerized data centers recently, as did Hewlett Packard with its version, called POD. Unlike most containerized data center offerings, HP is letting customers fill the POD with servers from any vendor - IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems, or otherwise.

There are some other vendor neutral containerized data centers, like American Power Conversion (APC)’s InfraStruXure Express and Verari Systems Inc.’s Forest, though Verari does push customers to use its proprietary blade servers, a spokesperson said.

Effective today, Rackable’s ICE Cube modular data center will be outfitted with IBM BladeCenter T or HT systems, which are NEBS-3/ETSI-compliant, meaning they’re certified for use in telecommunications environments and carrier facilities.

The ICE Cube is available in 20 or 40 foot container sizes. BladeCenter-specific configurations of ICE Cube can reach densities up to 1,344 dual socket, Quad core Intel Xeon blades, or 672 quad socket, dual core AMD Opteron blades.