BLADE Network Technologies, based in Santa Clara, California, was a supplier of Ethernet network switches for blade servers and server and storage data center racks.
BLADE was acquired by IBM in 2010, and was renamed "IBM System Networking" in 2011, which was later sold to Lenovo as part of its purchase of IBM's x86 server division
On February 13, 2006, Garnett & Helfrich Capital established BLADE Network Technologies, Inc., as a privately held company from a spin-out of Nortel's Blade Server Switch Unit, focused on networking for the blade server market. Vikram Mehta was president and CEO.
In 2008, the company introduced its RackSwitch line of top-of-rack 1-10 Gigabit Ethernet data center switches. IBM acquired BLADE in October 2010, renaming it to "IBM System Networking" in 2011.
Lenovo acquired IBM's server business, including System Networking, in 2014.