I’ve spent the last few days reading up about HARDCORE’s Liquid Blade solution. It looks very interesting for a number of reasons, as a blade boy in the early days of blade servers, I learned a number of things:
- Airflow is key in a blade deployment, air should be flowing straight through the blade enclosure to prevent any pockets of air and reduce unnecessary workload for the air conditioning systems and the blades themselves
- Appropriate technology – look at the voltage of the processors, what’s the performance per watt of the processor you’re choosing against volume of blades deployed, it’s the mid-range processor we want allowing us to deploy more servers at a similar or lower overall power footprint.
- Energy efficient components combined with convergence of technologies like SAN and network, so we achieve the most throughput with wire once type solutions, with 10GB Ethernet on board and the shared ports, meant fewer idle ports using less power.
We answered questions about cooling, about integrating into existing environments by discussing these kind of issues and highlighting the benefits of the blade platform, there were many studies, much analysis and talk about the blade in the enterprise and we saw the development of groups like the Blade Systems Alliance which continues to illustrate the success, opportunities and benefits of the blade platform. Going forward then, what’s next for the blade, many people have different views, there’s been the water cooled or liquid cooled data center, combined with technologies such as energy efficient power supplies, converged fabric and solid state disks, but it’s solutions like the HARDCORE Liquid Blade which look like the beginnings of the next generation blade.
Their blade solution uses liquid technology which is reported to provide some shockingly impressive results when it comes to their ability to cool the system over conventional air cooling. Coupling this kind of technology, with the option of technologies such as an extra gpu for processsing power, or extra storage whether it’s solid state, or even a fusion-io solution, think of the possibilities.
A liquid cool blade where we remove or reduce the barriers (real or perceived) with respect to the traditional discussions about air flow and ‘fitting it in with our existing setup’ kind of conversations.
With concepts around the environmental load both in air conditioning and combined with the new energy efficient components, could we see the blade platform revolutionized both in terms of the capabilities of the platform, dual socket multi-core, gpu enabled solid state engines for virtualization, hpc and grid computing, towards the equivalent that the data center in a container brought us in the data center space? Creating new opportunities not only for existing markets and businesses, but new ones alike, where I could create my own data center on demand solution for my enterprise, need capacity on demand for that data center power down, for that virtualization project, not a problem, we’ll send over the container, send it back when you’ve finished.
Likely with the Liquid Blade, with these kind of solutions might we find new possibilities in performance, compatibility and scalability? Could we find blade servers perform roles that previously might have been as not best suited to that format, indeed could we have grid solutions encompassing the latest processors, featuring onboard graphics processors and even fusion-io for that ultra high performance video or quantitative application?
We’ll have to see, regardless as ever at Bladewatch we welcome entrants new and old, with an increasing amount of interest, we wait and see what is in store for the blade platform from new entrants such as the Liquid Blade, as well as existing vendors who have continued to innovate and will continue to do so for many years to come. Let us never forget, that the more we discuss innovation, the more entrants there are to the market place, to the platform, the better the chances there are to deliver an industrial strength solution that can be easily adapted to a range of target markets, working for both the platform, the developers and the end user community alike, which is what IT is all about.
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