Blade Server Vendor Panel

http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com/

The blade server vendor panel was an interesting conversation where there was talk about the need for more energy efficiency in the data center. It was interesting to hear the different vendors’ viewpoint on what technologies they’re developing, what tools and best practices they are using to help customers with their power and cooling requirements. I wont go into the vendor specific comments as each vendor have their own solution or way to help with this.

The general agreement seemed to be that there is a need to focus on power in the data center as a whole, to focus on not just the server, but the network, the SAN and everything else which is absolutely right. Attacking power and cooling from the data center viewpoint, of looking at the big or small changes you can take to improve efficiency or reduce utilization has to be the way forward. For example, using SAN storage to replace those disk shelf arrays, looking consolidating server/application roles where possible and even hardware refresh to replace those legacy systems that might be providing a very poor performance per watt ratio.

There was also a general agreement that virtualization can be a real enabler to achieving the business need as well as assisting with the constraints in terms of data center power and cooling. That we can use virtualization as a platform to deliver service, to deliver that virtual machine for accounts, rather than deploying more physical machines. An interesting panel with interesting conversations and questions, very cool.