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The history of blade servers

There’s a great article over on Stephen Foskett’s blog talking about the history of blades, it contains some great information about the development of the blade platform and an interview with Chris Hipp founder of RLX, I met him a few times, a brilliant guy, very down to earth but equally intelligent, insightful and helpful.

The article reminds us where we have come from in such a short period of time towards where we are headed. Only a few years ago as a server guy we were talking about upgrading memory, disks and what standards we should be adopting in terms of re-deploying old hardware, was  DL380 G4 too old or good enough?

Now with the costs of servers, the drive for energy efficiency and understanding of the cost base (hardware support costs/decommissioning systems running old operating systems), we’re seeing the server increasingly as a commodity item, one in which we invest to deliver functionality and the underlying infrastructure, but equally a platform that can be re-mediated on to newer, faster and more efficient hardware as the economics or operations see fit.

Change is part of life as is innovation and automation, what we are seeing is a rapidly changing landscape both in technologies, best practices, roles and responsibilities as well as business opportunities. As engineers, as technologists and end users we need to be constantly embracing change and innovation, adapting it to suit our needs and understanding how we can stay ahead of the curve, or at the very least move along with it, rather than be left behind.

That said, I never miss the chance to reminisce given the opportunity, so with that in mind.

  • The first blade server I saw was a HP one, I think it was a BL10e – information lives here.
  • The first server  I installed Windows NT4 on was a Compaq Proliant DL760
  • The server that I first installed Windows 2000 on was a Compaq Proliant 1850R, followed by my amazement of witnessing and ‘building’ a Compaq Proliant DL360 G1
  • My first experience with VMware was on a Compaq Proliant DL580 G2 – with this hyperthreading thing, a completely new ILO interface and GBs of RAM an achievement in those days.

The first blade farm I deployed was composed of aproximately 1100 HP Proliant BL30P’s, which I then relocated to another data center I then moved on to playing with and supporting HP Proliant BL35p’s before moving on to building out 2500 IBM LS20s. The last blades I played with were a farm of HP Proliant BL460s I think they were G6s.

As smart as the automation techniques get, as redundant and easy to use the new servers are, I can’t help but remind myself of the joy at learning what SmartStart was, how to set up the RAID controller and what kind of RAID I wanted using the Compaq Array Configuration Utility. Times change, people change, but the opportunities to learn new things never do and we’ll end on that note.

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