Conferences

http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com

One of the topics at the Blade Systems Insight conference was the ‘green blade solutions’. A topic that remains of interest to me on several levels.

Firstly, I always like to see what experiences people are having with the technology, how we can illustrate blade servers as an enabler to your business, as an energy efficient platform. This is mainly because there have been a lot of statements about blades and power or cooling, about things to worry about with the technology. I’m all for talking about the issues with the platform, but at the same time we need to be logical about the platform, accentuate the positive and address those things to think about.

Secondly, in the UK we’re currently getting a bit worked up about the cost of power, you see energy costs are rising, IT therefore needs to be able to deliver the range of services that the end user (be it the trader at an investment bank or Bill shopping at Tesco and trying to pay with his credit card), to deliver different tiers of service, meet existing and new demand within the our power and cooling constraints.

We can deploy ‘green blade solutions’, how you define green, what you mean by green is going to depend on your business, your energy/power constraints.

Examples would be using blade servers with energy efficient power supplies, possibly on DC power, using fresh air cooling as part of a virtualization solution which is using SAN boot or Solid State boot, with energy efficient processors configured in a way that we can provision blades to meet the business demand and turn them off when not needed.

When I say energy efficient processors, this might not mean the ultra low voltage, it might be choosing the processors that bring us the most performance at the least acceptable power consumption, typically the low midrange processors, choosing the ultra high performance processors might only bring you 25% more performance for 50% more power and a higher additional cost per unit.

http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com and http://www.ibm.com/bladecenter

It was great to speak with IBM about their blades, I saw their BladeCenter S enclosure which is aimed at the small/medium business, with the various blades that you can use in the enclosure. It’s very cool technology.

The highlight (for me anyway) was the chance to see and talk about iDataPlex, their new modular computing solution which is aimed at Web 2.0 and grid/hpc requirements. I can see how iDataPlex would be great in terms of choosing the parts you need for your solution, a different target market, where the key thing is capacity. Do check it out.

http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com and http://www.hp.com/go/blades

I got to see the HP blade servers, including their Shorty as well as their C class blades which was very cool.

The new Shorty blade solution might be great for the small business market, as well as those enterprise organizations where I might need a simple infrastructure for development, a development grid or web infrastructure running on blades possibly using virtualization.

I also got to see their C-Class blades including their new BL260c which has a great performance per watt ratio, something I confess I will need to read up about.

http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com

It’s always interesting to hear what the different vendors think or talk about within the virtualization space. Is it power and cooling that they are thinking about in their products, that they are talking about to their end users? Is 10GB the way forward and will convergence of the network and SAN storage be the vehicle used to not only deliver the connectivity, the storage we need, but do so in an energy efficient or cost efficient way?

Going forward we need to think about several things with virtualization:

• Energy efficiency - of the server, the blade and the network/storage
• The ability to have a more fluid infrastructure - virtualization is great, but only if my processes - the way I do business are linked to this new technology - I’m not waiting 4 days for a virtual machine to be built.
• Ownership - more and more these days we’re hearing about outsourcing elements of the IT, of buying in parts of the infrastructure - how do we manage this operationally and financially - what’s included, what’s support and what isn’t - does the ‘end user’ care who provides the IT? Do they want to and are they able to pay their true cost?

http://www.bladesystemsinsight.com and http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/hardware/idataplex/index.html

I saw iDataPlex for the first time today and spoke with some of the guys at the IBM stand at BladeSystems Insight. I do love the concept.

That I can buy one rack and then add the modular components I need, is very interesting andideal for HPC or web infrastructure. I could have an array of shared storage for the individual servers storage (os/data) and then rack the number of systems that I need. I got to see one of the server modules, very very cool. Check out the IBM video.