The blades will presumably ship sometime during 2007. All that the networking giant will say for n now is the Fibre Channel switching blades will offer the same features as the company’s other switches and directors, and will be designed to fit into IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co server racks.
HP and IBM are the two biggest blade server suppliers by far. Yesterday IDC (see separate story) said that third quarter blade server revenue rose by 30% year-on-year.
QLogic launched its first bladed SAN switch in 2004, as did Brocade later that year. So far Cisco has simply offered to support QLogic blades when linked to its gear.
