Bladewatch.com

Techtarget

New survey results from Blade.org indicate that businesses of all sizes have flocked to blades for virtualization. But when it comes to blades, IT pros also have plenty to complain about.

Along with benefits such as good performance, small size and simplified management, blades pose a threat of vendor lock-in and high power and cooling requirements of a fully loaded chassis. And if a user doesn’t buy enough blades to fill a chassis, the purchase may not make economic sense, according to users.

Does size matter?

Blades are noted for their compact size. They offer the same performance as 1U and 2U rack servers but take up much less data center space. But many data centers run out of power faster than space, especially companies consolidating servers using virtualization, according to some IT pros.

“Locally, the thing we have the most of is space. Saving rack [units] has no value here,” said an IT administrator at a large New York-based university.

Another great article from techtarget talking about adoption of blades, it’s always an interesting topic to read about. I’ve had many a conversation with people about blades, from the too hot, too slow, to the vendor locked in argument. It’s one of those topics that can so easily divide people unnecessarily. I was having a chat with a CIO the other day who said “I’m not sure about being locked into a vendor..” when I asked about blades. I then asked him, “What servers do you buy?”, HP he replied, he’d been buying Compaq/HP since 2000, and had no intention of swapping. With this in mind, did buying a HP blade enclosure represent a bigger change than committing to HP rack servers?

Blade servers are a real solution for many businesses, whether it’s right for you is going to depend on your IT and your business, your level of comfort with a new platform and your data center power situation. With that in mind though, when coupled with virtualization, they can be a very energy efficient and adaptive platform for business, the benefit realized is dependent on the configuration and the infrastructure surrounding the blades.

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