Green blade solutions - what’s that all about?

http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com

One of the topics at the Blade Systems Insight conference was the ‘green blade solutions’. A topic that remains of interest to me on several levels.

Firstly, I always like to see what experiences people are having with the technology, how we can illustrate blade servers as an enabler to your business, as an energy efficient platform. This is mainly because there have been a lot of statements about blades and power or cooling, about things to worry about with the technology. I’m all for talking about the issues with the platform, but at the same time we need to be logical about the platform, accentuate the positive and address those things to think about.

Secondly, in the UK we’re currently getting a bit worked up about the cost of power, you see energy costs are rising, IT therefore needs to be able to deliver the range of services that the end user (be it the trader at an investment bank or Bill shopping at Tesco and trying to pay with his credit card), to deliver different tiers of service, meet existing and new demand within the our power and cooling constraints.

We can deploy ‘green blade solutions’, how you define green, what you mean by green is going to depend on your business, your energy/power constraints.

Examples would be using blade servers with energy efficient power supplies, possibly on DC power, using fresh air cooling as part of a virtualization solution which is using SAN boot or Solid State boot, with energy efficient processors configured in a way that we can provision blades to meet the business demand and turn them off when not needed.

When I say energy efficient processors, this might not mean the ultra low voltage, it might be choosing the processors that bring us the most performance at the least acceptable power consumption, typically the low midrange processors, choosing the ultra high performance processors might only bring you 25% more performance for 50% more power and a higher additional cost per unit.