Blade servers for all?

http://www.sun.com/customers/servers/uwm.xml

Founded in 1848, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has long been recognized as one of America’s great public universities. The school’s 41,000 students have a diverse range of liberal arts and professional programs to choose from, including agriculture, music, nursing, pharmacology, law, and veterinary medicine, to name a few. The Computer Sciences department is consistently ranked in the top ten in the United States.

I posted this article to highlight a number of issues and it’s an interesting read. It discusses how this university chose blade technology to meet the business needs. These business needs are common to many organizations, namely in terms of simplifying server deployment and management as well as replacing legacy infrastructure. Now obviously it’s built with Sun in mind, but it still raises some interesting examples and is worth reading.

The issue of simplifying server deployment and management is an important one, being able to re-deploy a server to a specific task or business line on demand, can be an invaluable enabler to your business - the web site is slow, take that development box, re-deploy the software image and re-define it as a web server for web application A. At the same time, being able to deploy servers in an effective and time efficient manner is key, that it might take days or weeks to deploy a server increases my cost, re-ignites my viewpoint “that it isn’t like this at our competitors” and makes IT seem like a cost center rather than an enabler.