Engarde! Blades Are Coming

Have you noticed all the activity in blade servers recently? Just in the past month, ServerPipeline has had a number of news stories about blade servers. (For example, check out, Blade Servers Cut Costs.) Clearly, there is something stirring in the blade server market. But do you know what it is, and whether it's important or not?

Well, the movement in the market could be important for you, depending on the situation in your particular data center. It might be that you're ripe for a blade server installation. Then again, you might not.

Server blades (the two terms seem to be used interchangeably) started out about four or five years ago as a way to meet the space requirements of the then new Internet data centers, hosting companies, and others who required a lot of server capability in a small space. You can pack a lot of server blades into a chassis that's about 7U high and goes into a rack with little muss or fuss. For example, IBM has a product called the BladeCenter that can pack something like 84 2-way servers into the single industry-standard rack, along with interconnects to get this metaphorical monster into your network. That's a lot of compute power in a very small space.

But space and infrastructure (like air conditioning) savings are not the end of the story. In the beginning, that was the ticket. If you were running an Internet hosting company and you wanted to maximize the number of customers you could get under one roof, then you wanted the smallest and least power-hungry server you could get. So, says Tim Dougherty, director of the IBM BladeCenter, the server processors that first went into blade servers were lower powered affairs, capable of doing light work. Nowadays, however, the blade server has grown up, so to speak. For example, both IBM and Intel, which has a development agreement with IBM, offers server blades with as many as four Intel Xeon processors, and IBM offers a server blade with as many as two PowerPC processors.

For its part, Intel offers similar products, sold through its OEM partners and white-box manufacturers.You can use these server blades for almost any kind of data processing need that you might have, according to Pat Buddenbaum, Intel's product line manager for the Intel Blade product line. "We see three segments," he said. "In the enterprise, for small and medium business and for high-performance computing."

He noted that the SMB segment is something of a surprise, but "We have seen them in remote locations, and for new installations. Blades make an interesting play for those retail applications." He lists, for example, a branch bank that may need local computing, but doesn't have an IT expert on site. Because of the simplicity of installation and replacement, and the lack of a single point of failure, he says, a blade server installation may be a good choice.

The main benefit of the blades, of course, is their size advantage. When you can get that many servers into a 7U space, you're ahead of the game, compared with a standard rack-mount server, or a box server. And with the space advantage comes a complexity advantage. Estimates are that you can save something like 83 per cent of the cabling that you would otherwise use if you go to a server blade solution. And the cooling load will be reduced, although Buddenbaum notes that with that many servers in one place, you can develop hot spots that will require some additional air-handling capability.

Not to be forgotten is the ease of management and installation for these blade servers. Management is built into the chassis, as is the connection to the rest of the network, and you can manage them over the Internet from any other computer workstation.

All those features make a compelling argument that server blades might have a place in your data center's future. In a follow-on article coming in May, we'll compare server blades from different manufacturers, and highlight features/capabilities that might make one product more apt to fit your needs than another.David Gabel has been testing and writing about computers for more than 25 years.