BladeSystems Insight

Associations

The following industry associations have endorsed BladeSystems Insight as a valuable business and networking forum for their member organizations. In addition, each association will be actively participating in the overall thought leadership program of the event.

Click each Association Logo to find out more information.

BladeS Mission Statement
The Blade Systems Alliance's (BladeS) mission is to advance the adoption of modular and blade-based computing systems. In cooperation with the worldwide community of data center professionals and other advanced systems users, BladeS:

• Promotes multi-vendor standards for modular systems management and racking.
• Works with the user community to address real-world data center and advanced computing issues.
• Delivers information, programs and forums to educate and inform.

The Blade Systems Alliance is a forum for end users, consultants, and vendors who are interested in the deployment and application of blade systems.

Blade.org

Blade.org is the premier open community dedicated to creating solutions based on the blade platform pioneered by IBM and Intel. With members worldwide, Blade.org includes leading blade hardware and software providers, developers, distribution partners and end users.
Douglas M. Balog, Vice President and Business Line Executive, IBM BladeCenter
Chairman, Blade.org - Executive biography

The SNIA’s mission is to advance the adoption of storage networks as complete and trusted solutions across the IT community. The SNIA works toward this goal by forming and sponsoring technical work groups, producing events, building and maintaining a vendor neutral Technology Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado and promoting activities that expand the breadth and quality of the storage networking market. The SNIA’s vision is:

• Be the authority for data and storage networks
• Be the catalyst for the development of solutions and standards
• Be a world-class industry organization uniquely focused on end users and storage standards

With more than 3,500 active participants representing 39 countries and nearly 200 organizations, the Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards. DMTF management technologies include the Common Diagnostic Model (CDM) initiative, the Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) initiative, Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) - including protocols such as CIM-XML and Web Services for Management (WS-Management) - which are all based on the Common Information Model (CIM).

The mission of the Ethernet Alliance is to promote industry awareness, acceptance, and advancement of technology and products based on both existing and emerging IEEE 802 Ethernet standards and their management.

The Ethernet Alliance will provide resources to establish and demonstrate
multi-vendor interoperability of IEEE 802 Ethernet products and their management.

Open Grid Forum (OGF) was formed in June, 2006 with the merger of the Global Grid Forum (GGF) and the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA). Headquartered in Chicago, OGF is a community of users, researchers, developers, and solution providers representing over 400 organizations in more than 50 countries. OGF works to accelerate grid adoption by providing an open forum for grid innovation and developing open standards for grid software interoperability.

The Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) is the Information Technology professional organization of choice for providing leadership opportunities, professional development and personal growth for IT professionals, educators and students for the exploration of issues that face the IT industry.
AITP offers opportunities for Information Technology (IT) leadership and education through partnerships with industry, government and academia. AITP provides quality IT related education, information on relevant IT issues and forums for networking with experienced peers and other IT professionals.

InfiniBand is a pervasive, low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect which requires low processing overhead and is ideal to carry multiple traffic types (clustering, communications, storage, management) over a single connection. As a mature and field-proven technology, InfiniBand is used in thousands of data centers, high-performance compute clusters and embedded applications that scale from two nodes up to a single cluster that interconnect thousands of nodes. The IBTA member companies run the gamut of data center implementations. The first version of the specification for the technology was completed in October 2000. Since then, more than 70 companies have announced plans to bring InfiniBand products to market.

The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems. In furtherance of its mission, The Green Grid is focused on the following: defining meaningful, user-centric models and metrics; developing standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve data center performance against the defined metrics; and promoting the adoption of energy efficient standards, processes, measurements and technologies.

The Blade Connect online community is a free service designed to help IT professionals learn more about blades for their business straight from peers and experts around the world. The easy-to-use community helps you to quickly find other members so you can exchange knowledge, develop a business partnership, or share tips and tricks. Get in, get connected, and get out - or stay online to collaborate and chat with your peers and the blade experts.