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The Blade Edge
Not just hi-tech lab material anymore, blade servers are gaining acceptance everyday

The buzz word in computing hardware is 'small form factor'. Whether it is desktops, portables or servers, the size of the machines are constantly shrinking. As a result today we see small footprint desktops, ultra portables, and thin and light servers that defy size and churn out huge computing power. Welcome to the world of Blade Servers that was once considered just a 'hi-tech lab material', and is now gaining market acceptance by the day.

The escalation of blades in the server space has been quite impressive. Even though they represent a small proportion of the server pie right now, their application scenarios in compute intensive environments across the world are growing. What is driving blades are the distinct benefits they bring to table. For instance, blades bring in high degree of server manageability, virtualization, simplified network and storage management. Also, blades consume less power, which translates into huge cost savings for enterprises. But despite all the benefits, blades are yet to create a big impact in the mainstream server space. Blade server applications are largely limited to data centers and high performance computing.

The Market Evolution
Blades are seen as a boon in bringing down server footprint that in turn will simplify server management. Blades provide more functionality, greater density as compared to conventional servers. Clearly blades bring in a highly scaleable, agile computing infrastructure that can be configured as per load patterns. As computing options continue to grow in the industry standard computing market, the emphasis is more on scale up vs scale out. Viswanath Ramaswamy, country manager, System x, IBM India says, "When we talk about scale up, we talk about the need for additional processors, memory and I/O thereby increasing a system's computing power. Availability and reliability are built into the more advanced technology. Scale out, on the other hand, means the addition of multiple low-end systems in a clustered configuration for greater performance, availability and reliability of the final solution." This clearly drives home the point that blade servers are an ideal platform for the physical consolidation of multiple heterogeneous servers.

The rapid adoption of blades is changing the personality of servers-offering double the density as compared to 1U rack servers. In the past the amount of heat generated per unit volume was an issue, but vendors coming out with effective cooling mechanisms have addressed that. (Calibrated vectored cooling is a scientific way to keep the temperature of the blades in a range that facilitates peak processor performance.)

"Enterprises with tower servers go for blades when they expand for having more working space, and for consolidated management as well" -Sashi Kanth, general Manager, India Business, Fujitsu
		"Blades have evolved primarily due to growing complexity and maturity of businesses in India. Infrastructure needs resulting in increased demand for reducing long term TCO." -Suresh Kumar, head, personal computing products, Wipro

Blade servers are a natural evolution of server form-factor and functionality. Says Krithiwas Neelakantan, general manager, systems practice, Sun Microsystems India, "The first generation of blade servers focused largely on physical attributes such as server density, that were largely deployed for edge-tier workloads like web serving, file-and-print services. The second generation of blade servers brought in improvements in computing capability and RAS features that have given confidence to customers to deploy them in mid-tier workloads like collaboration and messaging, application servers." The second generation blade market has all the trappings of a trend in the making, because most vendors expect the market to open up in a big way.

The blade server market used to be a three horse race: with IBM, HP and Dell battling it out. But a look at the market composition right now reveals the active presence of other vendors like Wipro, Fujitsu and Sun Microsystems offering a slew of blade products. The multiple vendors just reflect the expanding market for blades. A recent Gartner report suggests that blade server shipments in the Asia-Pacific region will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 27.4% over the next five years, to reach 168,200 units and a revenue of $494.3 mn by 2011.

The Indian Scenario
With defined benefits from blades, how is the market panning out in India? Going by the findings of market researcher IDC India, the blade server market has witnessed huge growth y-o-y. For instance, in 2003 the market for blades in India was just about 524 units. During 2004, blades grew by 100% with units summing to 1,055. In 2005, blades grew in excess of 248% with 3,679 units. For 2006, IDC has projected a market size for blades at 7,000 by the end of this year. Looking at the growth patterns, blades are clearly ramping up very fast and volumes increasing. Says Sanjit Sinha, general manager, research, IDC India, "Blades are poised for good growth with segments like R&D and high performance computing driving the market. The key advantages of blade servers are their small and thin form and greater functionality. Our outlook on the blade market in India is bullish."

Says Krithiwas Neelakantan, "There is cautious optimism among Indian enterprises in adopting blade servers. Most domestic customers have consolidated edge-tier and lower- level workloads on blade servers. Just as rack servers gradually supplanted tower servers, we expect blade servers to supersede rack servers over the next three to four years."

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