BLADE Network Technologies today announced that they have joined The Green Grid. Their pitch? "Rackonomics" for efficient data centers.

BLADE is a proponent of "Rackonomics," which recommends that an energy-efficient data center should be made up of replicated racks that have standard configurations of servers, storage and network. Rackonomics-based data centers can realize lower ongoing total cost of ownership through improved energy efficiency.

At least that's what the press release says. In CEO Vikram Mehta's blog, he explains the concept:

In modern data center architecture, Rackonomics refers to the concept of rack-level provisioning--designing, deploying and replicating server/computer systems, data networks and storage area networks (SANs) rack by rack to:

• decrease the total cost of ownership of data center infrastructures
• reduce IT complexity
• enable incremental scalability.

One of the primary tenets of Rackonomics is that putting switches into blade enclosures and server/storage racks is far more economical than using external core switches. Our customers have told us that a "put it in the rack" strategy can enable them to save tens of thousands of dollars in switch hardware, deployment and energy costs for every external switch that they can avoid deploying. And, the network switch has the ability to viritualize the network connections associated with the server/storage elements located in the rack, thus vastly simplifying the datacenter network.

He makes a pretty compelling argument with his rack-centric approach. You can see just how effective it is by perusing some whitepapers, which in a refreshing departure, don't require that you cough up your contact info.