Blade Hype For Real

If this is 2006, it must be time to hype blade servers. After all, why be any different from 2005? Or, for that matter, 2004? And yet, behind the hype, there continues to be real reasons why blade makers will push their machines, and why you buyers will continue to be interested in adding them to your data center's arsenal. A survey from InformationWeek confirms the momentum behind blades; the numbers say that an increasing number of you love the idea of cutting down the space that servers take up in your installations, and that the increased computing power and lower operating costs that come with deploying blade servers are too good to pass up as well. A third of the respondents even cite lower power consumption as a reason to move to blades, a tribute to the work blade manufacturers have done to cut the heat and power elements of blades as well as the number of heat-generating standard servers that a single blade can replace. Then again, another 37 percent of respondents worry about the additional cooling costs that come with blade deployments, so maybe more work -- or at least more education -- needs to be done on that front.

Still, blade servers are proving to be an agile way for enterprises to achieve scalability and streamlining in their data operations, and blade manufacturers are finding that specific market alignments are a good sell. Branch office operations can often be covered with a single blade in a branch that easily networks with the home data center, and IBM is now aiming to sell a blade platform that targets retail's needs. In all, blade deployments are bringing a real simplicity to the server room. Small business? Run all your operations on one small, powerful, easily configured box. Large enterprise? Just set up your rack and hot-swap blades in and out as you need 'em. Little wonder that 2006 is likely to shape up as the third straight Year Of The Blade Server.