I do love those crazy IBM commercials. You know the ones, with the blade servers? Well, now they have a reason for a whole new commercial set thanks to the the new blade running Opteron CPUs.

IBM announced the Opteron blades on stage during AMD’s dual-core Opteron launch in April and has been promoting the systems on its Web site for weeks. However, Big Blue said Wednesday that the systems are now available as part of its BladeCenter system.

An entry-level LS20 costs $2,259 for a model with a single 2GHz Opteron 248 and 1GB of memory, IBM said. With AMD’s 2GHz dual-core Opteron 270, the price rises to $3,649. The systems can accommodate two Opterons.

Blades are thin systems that slide side-by-side into a chassis that supplies shared infrastructure such as power supplies and network connections. The blade server market is growing faster than the overall server market, with IBM in the lead. [Read the rest]