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Blade servers good for City of Burbank

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=200000234

The city of Burbank, Calif., needed speed and flexibility in its hardware when it decided about three years ago to upgrade its Oracle ERP system. For Mahesh Saraswat, the city’s technical project manager, the best choice was blade servers, but for the other stakeholders, moving to such a dramatically different architecture was awfully scary.
“It was a cultural struggle,” Saraswat said of trying to sell the idea to business and IT managers. “People don’t want to touch anything new.” In addition, city departments often pay for their own servers and like to see a box that they can call their own. Blades are hidden in chassis and don’t offer the same feeling of ownership. “To them [department heads], it looks like one big computer,” Saraswat said.

In 2004, Saraswat was new to his job. Before becoming a city worker, he was an independent consultant. Before that, he had worked for Oracle. To convince people blades were the best choice, Saraswat first had to get them to trust the new guy. “I wanted to change their operations and data center, and it took awhile to build up their confidence.”

Check out this article, it’s talking about this city adopting blade servers, what challenges they had, what they were replacing etc, a very interesting read. Blade servers might not be right for everyone, but deployed in the right way for the right application, they can bring real benefits to the way you provision and supply the server, couple it with a deployment tool like Altiris or SAN/image boot from Ardence, and pre-provisioning could see your lead time for a server drop from months to hours, simply deploy the blade, allocate it the departmental image and go.

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