Blade Watch

Information Week

Blade servers are the fastest-growing segment of the server market, but deployments are expected to be limited over the next few years by a lack of standards and other factors, a market research firm said Thursday.

Despite a compound annual growth rate of 19% from 2007 to 2012, blade servers will not dominate, Gartner said. Instead, they will represent 20% of the market in 2012, up from 10% in 2007.

An interesting read. It depends on your viewpoint. There are differences between the vendors blade servers.

The functionality and configuration of the enclosures are different, the network/SAN infrastructure might be different, and the way you re-load the operating system/manage the blades is different. But the support/configuration concepts remain the same, there’s an enclosure, there are blades which you plug into the blade enclosure, and some form of SAN/network switch and fabric.

I’m not trying to put light on the subject, but you should be treating your blade systems like you would the rest of your IT. Switching vendors needs consideration in terms of your support, your system administration and reporting, but recognizing that you have the right platform for the role is equally as key.

Understanding that different systems might fulfill different roles and need not dramatically affect your support costs, using technologies like SAN boot, imaging the operating system, might allow you to have different vendor blades operating in parallel.

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