Bladewatch.com

We’ve been making remarkable progress over the last few years with blade technology. From the early days of small servers which could be deployed in volume, with perceived limitations in cpu, ram and disk, to the current generation with options for SAN storage, GBs of memory, multi socket, multi core systems with 10GB Ethernet.

The opportunities with blade servers have been realized both from an operational and technological sense, but there are still opportunities and business requirements that we need to explore, innovation is an ongoing process and the more we innovate the platform, discuss challenges and solutions, the more we can develop the blade platform and realize it potential even more as a platform for revenue generation and business empowerment.

I got asked the other day what I perceived as the key benefits of blade technologies the other day and here are a few:

• More servers in the same space footprint, 96 blades in a cabinet for example against 22 1u rack servers
• Ease of deployment and management, using the on board blade and enclosure management tools, combined with a deployment tool.
• Connectivity can be made easier and less complex when using integrated switches, and with converged networking we can reduce the number of physical patches and ports reducing power consumption.
• Converged power and connectivity, fewer power and network cables on a per server basis, only using the power you need to drive the servers when using the integrated energy efficient power supplies and power management tools, which might shut down power supplies or cooling on demand.
• The concept in which you can deploy application infrastructure on demand, I want a CDO system, not a problem, bring online enclosure C and deploy the CDO build.

There are more, but that’s off the top of my head. I know one company I had spoken with had simply liked the concept of reduced patching as this meant less calling out a service provider to build another server, the blade enclosures were pre-patched and all that was needed was some switch configuration, combined with fewer cables requiring auditing and management.

So what are the challenges (real and perceived):

• Volume server deployments continue to present issues around cooling and power requirements in some data centers, particularly if you are deploying a volume of blades in a small footprint. We are seeing innovation in this space.
• Proprietory technology – every blade conference I go to normally has a manager asking when we will see interoperability on the enclosures – but the nature of the product does not lend itself to this, we will have open standards, open and discussed best practices and configurations, but the concept of putting vendor blade a in enclosure vendor b is not something that meets either the vendor or the customer in some respects. We’re seeing further innovation in best practice and open standards.
• Different management technologies and standards – this might sound harsh and is more operational in nature, some of the terminology, some of the ways we do things in the blade world differs from vendor to vendor, that’s to be expected, but the more we can remove any barriers to entry, from cost and in terms of technology, the more we can on board end users and create opportunities in the blade space.

The innovation of the blade platform continues, and the more the end user community gets involved, and the more vendors communicate with their customers, the more we can establish a dialogue, share best practice and operational stories, discuss new ideas, to innovate not just because it’s a business requirement, but because it could equally be a business opportunity. Today’s innovation could be tomorrow’s business requirement.

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