Blade Network Technologies recently extended its switching technology to another blade server vendor, providing another example of Blade's pervasiveness in this niche.

Blade claims it has 45% of this market, which it has focused on like a laser. The company further claims that its switches are owned by more than half of the companies in the Fortune 500. It has achieved all this through its well-known deals with IBM, HP and NEC for their various blade server systems. Blade Network Technologies was spun off from Nortel a couple of years ago.

Blade says it entered into joint product development with Verari, creating a port switch blade specifically for the Verari BladeRack 2 that has 48 ports of Gigabit Ethernet and four ports of 10 Gigabit. Blade and Verari say that the new switch can be used to help combine up to 16 virtual machines on a single blade server.

The companies say that blade servers need a lot of bandwidth to cope with server virtualization, grid computing, Web 2.0 technologies and other data-intensive applications. As more blade-based servers are deployed to pack more computing power into a smaller space, the network inside the blade server enclosures becomes just as important as any other network connection.

Verari notes that its BladeRack 2 X-Series blade servers can be connected to Blade's new RackSwitch data-center switches, including a unit with 24 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet that starts at about $12,000.

The new switch is scheduled to ship by year-end.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.