Battle of the Blades

Blade servers may be the future of data centers, but for now, their future is linked to two elements for which development is still lacking. When it comes to storage and software, the promise of blade servers is still unfulfilled.

What's the holdup? Two things: There's no standard interface for putting storage switches into blade servers. There's also a lack of standardized APIs for virtualization. Yet without these elements, the promise of blade servers will remain largely unrealized.

Let's look more closely. By themselves, blade servers are comparable in cost to their rackmount predecessors, which can be nearly as compact in size, and often less costly in terms of power consumption and cooling. The difference with blade servers is that they share chassis, hardware, software management, and storage connectivity.

Consider an example from Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) in this month's Byte and Switch Insider, titled Blade Servers: Bargain or Bust?: A small, typically configured HP BladeSystem, without SAN connectivity, costs about $816 (about 1 percent) less than the vendor's 1U rackmount server. When you add Fibre Channel switch blades – available for HP's chassis from Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) and McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA), the cost is $11,216 (about 15 percent) less than the rackmount solution.

The value of a blade server rises significantly with SAN connectivity, thanks to the savings in cabling, HBAs, and optics. Since most blade servers don't have much on-board storage, it's also most practical to use them with networked storage.Despite this, vendors of storage switches are facing an uphill battle. Lack of a standard interface to blade servers means each switch module must be recreated for each blade server. With six major vendors shipping blade servers, that's a lot of development effort.

Not everyone thinks it's worth it. While Brocade and McData developers are busily putting their fabric switches on as many platforms as possible, has held back. "Currently, the systems vendors (HP, IBM, Dell, Intel, etc.) don't yet have any coordinated standards efforts. From an interconnect perspective, it would help Cisco if there [were] a standard for I/O interconnect, and we will help to promote and further standards there," writes a Cisco spokeswoman in an email.

Though Ed Chapman, director of marketing for Cisco's Storage Technology Business Unit, says Cisco may have more to say on the subject next year, it's clear Cisco's not willing to join the blade-switch party on present terms.

So far, the only effort to unify an approach to blade-module design has been launched by IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM). Called Blade.org, it is still in the planning stages, although Cisco, Brocade, Citrix Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), , Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP), , Novell Inc. (Nasdaq: NOVL), and VMware Inc. have said they’ll act as founding members (see IBM Forms Blade Community).

But how likely is it that a group sponsored by IBM will be endorsed by HP, Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL), and Fujitsu Ltd. (Tokyo: 6702; London: FUJ)?Similar problems surface in the realm of virtualization, where development is largely a matter of writing code for VMware, at least for now.

So here we are again, at a technology crossroads, with vendors acting as tollkeepers to protect their interests. With luck and pressure from users, those interests will increasingly lean toward augmenting the blade-server architecture. If they don't, the future could remain on hold.

— Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

This report, Blade Servers: Bargain or Bust?, is available as part of an annual subscription (12 monthly issues) to Byte and Switch Insider, priced at $1,350. Individual reports are available for $900. For more information, or to subscribe, please visit: www.byteandswitch.com/insider0