Blades Still Too Hot

Blades may be helping firms consolidate their compute power into much smaller spaces, but heat and power issues continue to trouble IT managers and CIOs, driving up the cost of the technology.

"The difficulty is heat, and how to get rid of that heat," explained Dennis Lair, senior technologist at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), during an event in New York City this week. "We have a limited amount of space -- [heat] seems to be a common issue that I have to deal with."

The exec told Byte and Switch that the agency has packed HP blades into its five data centers dotted around the world and is now struggling to keep them cool. "The indications that I am getting are that it's damned expensive to make the alterations to the facilities to get rid of the heat."

Another blade user at the event agreed that the technology brings a unique set of problems. "Issues of power and utilization need to be addressed," said Steve Grill, global head of IT architecture at HSBC's Corporate Investment, Banking and Markets (CIBM) division. Users, he told Byte & Switch, may have to make some radical decisions when it comes to solving these problems. "When it comes to power, the only way to address that is having less blades," he explained.

It's not a bulletin that heat and cooling have long been a problem for many blade users. (See Summer Storage Survival, Study Highlights Blade Disappointment, Data Center Heat Wave, and Vegas Blade Warning.) Options for dealing with the issues include deploying specialist cooling systems, moving to a managed data center with better environmental support for blade servers, or simply getting rid of the blades. (See EMC Offers APC Racks, It's All Cool, and NewEnergy Chops Its Blades.)"We definitely see a lot of enterprise customers that have refreshed their server infrastructure with blades and realize that they have outgrown the power capacity of their data center," Miles Kelly, vice president of marketing at 365 Main, told Byte & Switch today.

Kelly estimates that a seven-foot rack packed with blade servers draws up to four times the power that the same rack packed with standard servers would have four years ago. Earlier this week, the provider says, gaming firm Online Game Services Inc. (OGSi) shifted its 1,000-strong IBM blade infrastructure to a 365 Main data center in San Francisco, thanks in part to cooling concerns. (See OGSI Chooses 365, IBM Goes for SMB Blades, and IBM Bolsters Blade Strategy.)

The blade users at this week's New York event weren't willing to ditch their blade servers or outsource them, however. HSBC's Grill, for instance, said he's pleased overall with his choice, especially since traditional servers probably couldn't cope with the multiple server workloads incurred by virtualizaiton. "In general, our experience with blades has been positive, it has simplified our configurations," explained Grill.

These sentiments were echoed by the DIA's Lair. "For us, the big thing is ensuring that we get good utilization of our [data center] capacity," he said.

Blade vendor IBM, which announced a partnership with virtualization specialist GemStone this week, also took part in the New York event. (See GemStone Delivers XFire.) Tom Bradicich, CTO for IBM's BladeCenter and System X product lines, explained that the vendor's blade.org initiative, which aims to tie as many technology partners as possible into the IBM blade architecture, now has around 100 members. (See NetXen Elected to Blade.org, Aristos Joins Blade.org, and Blade.org Grows to 60.)The CTO also confirmed that IBM is working to bolster its blade story. "We will be doing some amazing things with respect to lowering the management costs and increasing the efficiency in the data center in the areas of virtualization, energy efficiency, and high availability," he told Byte and Switch. "You will see some announcements along these lines in the first quarter."

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch