A two minute short answer round with one of my ex-colleagues who’s just started deploying blades and grid at another bank:
Q. What’s been your experience with grid, positive?
On the whole yes, we’ve got several thousand blade servers running a risk application on windows. The main challenge was a different way of working due to the volume of systems.
Q. You say volume in what way?
Numerous, the datacenter factor was one, but simply, just a different way of thinking. The old way, building a server, loading the application, setting up your monitoring tool like MOM or TNG, just could not be continued. To deliver 200 servers within a short period of time, everything has to be scripted/deployable and as automated as possible, that coupled with licensing costs. Deploying a server with monitoring software costing £20 a month is a marginal cost to your business, 200X£20 gets noticed more.
Q. What problems did you have with the hardware?
Mainly DOA dead on arrival blades, that in itself is a cost of doing business, but frustrating nonetheless, regardless of how much you liase with your supplier it’s going to happen, it’s just again noticed more due to the volume, say you get a 5% failure rate, that’s 10 for every 200 you buy.
Q. What didn’t you expect?
Grid is the in thing right now, so people are talking about it, one thing we have had was having to say no to some applications for grid. The sales pitches can be very convincing but not everything can be packaged in such a way that you can ‘grid it’, not everyone likes being told that.
Q. Any words of wisdom about grid/blades?
Think of what you’re wanting to achieve, how you plan to implement them, and how you plan to manage the blades (grid) on a day to day business, one of the things we noticed was that it required the infrastructure teams to become a bit more involved with the applications, something not everyone is comfortable with. The concept of, I’ll build you a blade with windows went out the window, if you’re going to build me a blade, get it application ready, I want a package not a white box, I can build a white box, the concept of an application specific build.
