Blade Watch

Was in a meeting with one of our blade deployment and virtualization consultants we had in for the day. The datacenter guy and myself were stating the problems with buying more blades for this particular application to meet their additional capacity (we basically lack datacenter space and cooling is starting to be an issue). His response below: (Anyway my questions/comments are not in quotes.)

We’ve got a problem with hosting more blades, the datacenter capacity is ok (for the moment), but cooling is becoming a problem physically and financially. 

“Hang on, how long are you keeping these blades?”

Well they’re depreciated over 3 yrs, typically out the door by four, because by then they’ll want more powerful servers, the early Intel Xeon bladess are getting on, they want dual core/quad core blades now for better performance.

“Why not just turn the cooling down by 1 or 2%”

Well they’d run hot and they wont last as long, they’re production – we can’t let them overheat and go offline.

“No, no, not, overheat, just think about this. The standard x86 blades are factory rated to operate at up to say 45 degrees C, you’ll be running your data-enter at say 25 right?”

Yes we try to maintain low 20’s for ideal an operating environment.

“Turn the temperature up by 2 degrees, you’ll see you can either fit more blades in, or reduce your power consumption and operating costs by a significant amount. We approximately one hundred thousand a year in electricity costs.”
You’ve said yourself you wont have the blades/servers in say four years, why be concerned if they will only last 4 years instead of 8?”

Wont the disks fail more quickly?

“They’re batch servers for grid right, you’ve chosen IDE notebook style drives? They’re going to be the weakest point of the blade anyway, you know yourself that they’re a support issue as you discussed. Since they’re grid, they’re meant to be disposable, replaceable on demand.”

Anyway a very interesting perspective,

Some unique ways of thinking about things, but in reality saying what you might think but might not want to say……

Related posts:

1. Four points about energy efficient blade solutions Hi Martin, Can you summarize a few points about creating...
2. Blades are the next big thing Techtarget New survey results from Blade.org indicate that businesses of...
3. Matching your data center to your application Computerworld Computerworld – Next month is the one year anniversary...
4. Looking at Appro blades http://www.appro.com/product/greenblade_main.asp Now you can do more with less. The Appro...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.