Blade and Dicker Data hunt Cisco on the rack

Dicker Data has picked up exclusive rights to distribute Blade Network Technologies' top-of-rack switches in Australia and New Zealand.

Blade Network already has established a presence worldwide through its OEM agreement with IBM and HP.

Blade Network supplies embedded switches for those vendors' blade systems and claims that 50 percent of blade server systems use its products.

"We are already a market leader in that space," said Vikram Mehta, president and CEO of Blade Network Technologies, who was in Australia to sign the distribution deal.

The expansion into top-of-rack switches was the first time Blade Network had sold through the channel under its own brand. The OEM deal with IBM and HP remained unaffected, however.

Dicker Data was chosen because it was already distributing HP's blade systems, said Mehta.

Therefore its resellers were already familiar with Blade Network's embedded switches.

The decision to take the top of rack switches through the channel rather than OEM was deliberate, said Mehta. "If you look at the market opportunity for top of rack products it goes beyond the blade server vendors," said Mehta.

"Our server OEM partners resell these products as opposed to private labelling them as an OEM product."

The vendor was targeting six verticals with its top-of-rack switches, including high-performance computing, defence and retail. 

A Blade Network demonstration equipment purchase program has been made available through Dicker Data. An early-bird discount was also available until the end of 2009.

The distributor was also holding training on advanced data centre networking technologies and pre-sales support on network design consultation and support.

Dicker Data was supplying sales support, investment for market development and additional discounts for registered deals.

Mehta claimed that Blade Network competes directly with Cisco for top-of-rack switching.

Mehta claimed his switches were superior because they used open standards rather than proprietary technology; had latency times nine times lower; used 65 percent less power; and cost a fifth the price.

Mehta added the switches were guaranteed to work in any legacy Cisco network. He pointed to two recent wins over traditional Cisco accounts.

Thompson Reuters in Korea had conducted a head-to-head comparison between a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) solution and an IBM-Blade Network combination. The customer decided on the IBM solution because it "delivered all the benefits of Cisco UCS without being locked into proprietary technology".

The New York Stock Exchange Euronext, which ran its backbone with Cisco, had decided to replace it with Juniper Networks and Blade Network, claimed Mehta.

"We are working exceptionally closely with them to build out a brand new trading network that will improve the latency for their traders by an order of magnitude," said Mehta.

Blade Network is launching a DC version of its top-of-rack switches next month for use in containerised data centres. Veradi Systems has already built a container-format data centre that uses Blade Network switches.

Australia and New Zealand form the second wave of the vendor's expansion. The first countries were Japan, Korea and China and the third wave will cover the rest of Asia, according to Mehta.