Post By Martin 1 Comment
May 2009 15

What’s next for blade servers?

I remain excited about Cisco entering the blade market (check out this article), the more competition and innovation in the blade market, the more accessible and affordable we make the platform. That said, we need to standardize on the basics, improve systems management both in terms of building the blade, but also of managing the hardware, the configuration and the monitoring. Anything we can do in these areas has to be a good thing.

In the meantime, I look forward to seeing how Cisco and now Oracle (owning Sun) are going to innovate these markets, building infrastructure solutions (as HP have with their HP BladeSystems Matrix or IBM/Dell and the others) that can be deployed to meet different business needs, identifying blades as a vehicle for change, for achieving your business goals.

At the same time, I look forward to seeing how we can create unified computing solutions, where the storage, the network and the server can be managed, vendor specific solutions are ideal for many customers, but open standards, open technologies that let me manage my Dell and my HP, my IBM and my EMC is just as important – not everyone is tied to one platform, I’m not asking for the vendors to do the impossible, simply provide the right hooks, the right tools to make it just that little bit easier for multi-platform management.




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One Comment

  1. DanielBowers says:
    May 19, 2009 at 21:32

    I'm excited to see what innovation is sparked by Cisco's foray into blade infrastructure.

    I see two different challenges to “unified” management. One is cross-vendor. I agree, what needs to happen is that open standards should be followed by all vendors, so that single management solutions can control everything.

    The second challenge is cross-domain. Merging server, network, and storage makes sense when you've got a “medium” sized infrastructure. (Small infrastructures tend to be so acquisiton-cost centric, and “unified management” comes across as “too expensive”.)

    For a huge infrastructure, though, the network, servers, and storage are managed by different teams with different policies. The separate teams won't — or can't — manage things jointly. So there's not as much push to merge, say, networking and server management.

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