Trade.Information

Product Name: Blade Servers

Product Description

As companies move towards consolidating data center space and reducing operating
costs, more IT professionals are considering including blade servers within
their selection of new server deployments. Blade servers have been touted as an
important new infrastructure element for the "flexible" enterprise
data center. Capable of turning the hype of "on-demand" or
"utility" computing into reality, blade servers are considered highly
modular devices that offer three to ten times the density of traditional,
rack-mounted servers, along with substantial improvements in management cost and
systems integration costs. However, as blade servers have begun to penetrate the
market, a laundry list of concerns have arisen - from issues related to power
and cooling, vendor's proprietary designs, the relative immaturity of the
technology, as well as premium prices. IT professionals must not only weigh the
costs and benefits of implementing blade servers, but also conduct scrupulous
planning and design in order to optimize the use of blades within the enterprise
data center.
The Basics on Blades
A blade server is a modular, stripped-down computer system consisting of a
motherboard with memory and processors. Often relying on external storage
systems for their data requirements, blade servers are usually intended to
operate in a network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN)
environment. Blade servers pack a lot of computing power in a very small space,
enabling IT professionals to minimize the data center footprint significantly,
without sacrificing processing power. In fact, standard measurements of blade
servers run less than 1U, which allows more blades, each supporting one, two,
four, or even eight processor cores, to be installed in 1U of rack space. (A
"U" is defined by the Electronics Industry Association (EIA) as a
height unit measuring 1.75 inches, or 4.45 centimeters, of vertical space within
a rack.)
To achieve such high densities, blade servers are installed in a
specially-designed, rack-mounted chassis that distributes physical
infrastructure components - such as power supply, cooling, cabling and
management - to each of the blades. The system server modules are capable of
being automatically connected to power when plugged into the chassis (hot-pluggable),
giving IT administrators physically simple provisioning through easily swapping
blade servers and having it power up and be recognized by a system management
console, all without powering down the entire system.
The system management console consists of the basic monitoring and management
software normally used with x86-based servers, as well as additional management
tools that enable IT administrators to perform automated deployment and
re-provisioning of blade servers at will. Through the console, IT administrators
can manage hundreds of blades, create an image of one blade server's
configuration and then install that image on many other blades, and dynamically
reallocate blade servers as deemed necessary.
Cutting to the Core
In its infancy, blade servers were primarily considered as dense edge devices,
targeted at consolidating sprawling racks of small 1U servers. As blade
technology has expanded to incorporate two-way and larger symmetric
multi-processing (SMP) blades, the use of blade servers has begun to shift from
the network edge toward the enterprise core. However, suitable applications for
blade servers remain within two general categories - front-end and mid-tier
applications.
The Luminous Side of Blades
Enterprise agility has been well publicized as the critical means to stay ahead
of the competition and provide customers with needed services and products in
today's market dynamics. As the data center is the essential component to
provide the capabilities to maintain flexible business operations, creating a
flexible data center has become the primary focus of many IT professionals. The
concept of modular computing promises to deliver more flexible data center
capabilities through modular hardware and software, automation tools and
hardware virtualization, with blade servers being at the leading edge of modular
hardware.
Currently advertised as a viable, space-saving alternative to stand-alone and
rack-mounted servers, blade servers significantly reduce complexity, streamline
deployment, improve reliability and achieve better server density.
The Jagged Edge of Blades
Although blade servers appear to be the bright and shining light to solve IT
professionals' woes within the data center, they do not come without their own
share of risks. Even though analysts continue to predict strong growth of blades
within the server market, many IT organizations remain hesitant about
authorizing broad deployments of blade servers. Most of the concerns revolve
around data center environmental issues, premium costs and the lack of
interoperability and interchangeability.
Conclusion
Although much hype has been made about blade servers being the end all, be all
server technology for the flexible enterprise, in the end, blade servers are
merely another form-factor option for both scale-up and scale-out data center
infrastructures. As blade technology will continue to evolve, investments in
blade servers today should be considered for their short-term returns on
investment, rather than long-term benefits.
To view more on the benefits and risks associated with blade servers, as well
as the essential planning to be done before buying and/or implementing blade
technology, download the Blade
Servers: The Double-Edged Sword for the Data Center white paper.