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Recent Hardware Knowledge

With the release of dual-core Xeon chips for blade servers, Intel has again accentuated the ability of companies to save money in terms of lower power consumption and increased reliability.

Studies indicate a blade server can reduce power and cooling costs 15 to 25 percent, meeting the needs of energy-conscious customers. The dual-core/dual-processor capabilities are ideal for a wide range of low-power communications and embedded applications.

Blade-server fact: Even blades that don’t use lower-power processors can reduce the overall power and cooling requirements of a rack by eliminating many duplicate power-consuming infrastructure components that are included in 1U and 2U rack servers.

A blade server might only consume one-half or two-thirds the power of traditional 1U and 2U rack-mount servers of equivalent processing power. The reason is that the consolidation of the resources helps the blade server gain an economy of scale. For example, rather than having 10 500-watt supplies for 10 traditional 1U servers, a blade server can have two 2,000-watt supplies.

An interesting post talking about blade technologies in terms of energy efficiency. This is an issue which is regularly discussed and debated, but I wonder in some respects could be seen as redundant? By that I mean regardless of your personal preference, you should be deploying the most energy efficient, the platform that is best suited to your environment (data center, business and technology based). That your skill set is based on rack servers, that you have the infrastructure, the business buy-in with rack servers, or that you need to deploy a grid or VMware solution in volume, then blades might be ideal. The energy efficiency of your hardware is important, but just as important is how you configure the operating system, how your application is coded to exploit the benefits of the new processors, that you are dollar for dollar getting the most from the infrastructure is key, everything else is just noise.

On the blade front, the key deliverables are the integrated switches, the energy efficient power supplies and the ability to deploy infrastructure in volume in a condensed format, with this in mind though, you need to ensure that you have the relevant ability to deliver power and effective cooling to where it needs to be.

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