Byte and Switch - Insider: Storage Boosts Blades - Storage Networking News Analysis

“Vendors have focused on blade servers as a perfect complement to SANs and see the use of blade server-storage combinations as satisfying customer needs,” explains Smetannikov. “Many have launched new products that deliver not just storage functionality, but also applications that have been developed on the assumption of the availability of blade server-storage switch infrastructure.”

Once you’re able to attach storage to your blade infrastructure, their possible uses whether for small departmental projects, or even consolidation become more apparent.  An example being IIS, at the moment there tends to be shared infrastructure IIS or individual teams/departments buying their IIS servers, with this comes the hosting and usual growth/capacity planning obstacles, (we’re using a mixture of DL360/DL380 rack mounts.)

From an infrastructure angle, and application a rack/enclosure of blades would be great. 16 dedicated web servers for example, 2 hot standby, the rest easily configurable for the application team and freeing up all those dl380s’, i’ll give you an example, we have intranet and internet applications, we might get up to 25 sites on a server, but we need four for resiliance for tier 1. That means I might have several cabinets dedicated to intranet and internet, particularly since there will be the transversal internet applications and the business specific trading or ‘admin/management tools’, like http://traderisk.intranet or http://onlinepcsales.intranet. All requiring hosting, we could consolidate the 70 or so servers into a couple of blade cabinets with network attached storage, two things would come from this.  Reclaimed data center space, and the ability to be proactive with our capacity planning, the ability to say to the business team, your pricing site is getting more traffic, simply rebuild/re-image that blade and deploy the application within hours, even more so if it’s linux.