Bladewatch.com

TechTarget

The old paradigm of one application per 1U or 2U rackmount server is no longer; users and analysts say the latest blade servers are packed with CPU and memory and can run virtual machines and heavy applications, all while outperforming their rackmount counterparts.

While early-edition blades were said to cause significant heat issues, the new versions are architected with superior cooling technology and monitoring to avoid this pitfall. The latest blades also include multicore processors and the same amount of memory, network interface cards (NICs) and host bus adapters (HBAs) as rackmount servers, said Barb Goldworm, the president and chief analyst of Focus Consulting in Boulder, Colo., and author of the book Blade Servers and Virtualization .

Innovation of the blade platforms continues, what we’re finding interestingly is the development of blade servers not just in terms of power and cooling, but for specific platforms, products like IBM’s iDataPlex for gird/web 2.0, or HP’s blade for VMWare the BL495c. That we continue to innovate the blade as a platform, but at the same time offer business scenarios or solutions based on that platform is key, how the end user can see blades as an enabler to their business when deployed with the right sets of tools and configurations.

The benefits in blade servers tend to be in volume, for example being able to consolidate several servers on to one common platform, can save on hardware support costs, reduce the build time, and can be more efficient from a patching/provisioning standpoint. Want to re-allocate webserver4 to a customer facing network, all networks have to do is reconfigure the switch, and the windows guy re-configure and reboot the server. On a traditional server we might have to allocate a new network patch, get a new network cable, not a big thing but more people involved – more possibilities of delays.

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