Blade servers might not suit all due to power/cooling issues

http://servervirtualization.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/04/27/are-blade-servers-still-too-hot-to-handle/

As seen by most IT managers, blade servers are hot little power-suckers. Cooling hassles and power costs are the main reasons why IT managers don’t buy blade servers, according to the new TechTarget Data Center Group survey of over 250 IT professionals. In fact, most of the respondents’ companies aren’t using blades today. I’ll be presenting that bad news and some good news from our 2007 Server Decisions Survey next week at the Server Blade Summit in Anaheim, Calif., which focuses on blades and virtualization.

While there I’ll be asking blades proponents, users and prospective users about power and cooling issues with blades. Just to give you a preview, here’s a quick look at both sides of the story.

We have to be careful with these kind of issues, granted blades from an off the shelf viewpoint due require more power than say a rack mount server, but let’s look at the volume aspect, I get say 16 servers in the space to two midrange DL585 type servers. Blades can be a really effective vehicle for virtualization, however, we need to ensure that the data center is right, that the blades chosen are right for the customers needs, do we really need the 95w super fast chip? Surely the 68w one which is 200mhz slower will be fine right?  When putting in blades you need to look at the big picture, move the blade enclosures around so they aren’t all in one concentrated area and focus on the air flow. Do check out the article though, its a great read.