IBM continue the evolution of their BladeCenter platform

IT Jungle

There is so much malware, spam, and other garbage running around the Internet these days that it is fair to say that the idea of anonymity expressed in the Internet Protocol was probably a bad choice. But, because the world runs on TCP/IP these days and we are not about to all be issued permanent IP addresses at birth, whether we are humans or servers, we are stuck trying to cope with the onslaught as best we can with various kinds of security products. IBM rolled out a new one last week.

The BladeCenter PN41 is a new kind of blade server from Big Blue. It is not a generic X64 or Power blade, suitable for running Windows, Linux, AIX, or i operating systems, but rather a device using a specialized processor from Intel and a set of systems software encoded on the blade that allows it to do deep packet inspect and network traffic shaping in an effort to cope with viruses, other kinds of malware, and denial of service attacks on networks. This kind of blade would have been handy in both Russia and Georgia a few weeks ago, when the two countries essentially went to war over the separatist regions of Abkahzia and South Ossetia but before the tanks rolled in and the gunfire started, they both launched hack attacks on each other’s public-facing government computers.

It’s great to see further innovation by IBM of their blade solutions. That we can have a secured blade server, which can be used to secure elements of the infrastructure has to be a good thing, and could be of interest to many organizations, especially since it is set to be compatible with their existing enclosures. I can have my existing web farm in the enclosure, and allocate one of these PN41 blades to secure the blades in that enclosure, very cool. I’ll need to read up more, do check it out. The more people we bring online, the more steps we need to take to secure our infrastructure, secure client data, maintaining the ‘Chinese walls’ that might exist between different users groups. The full IBM press release is here.