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Circa 1995: A typical data center with huge tower servers, taking up large surface area and guzzling huge power making it an IT managers nightmare

2008: A new age data center with blades neatly stacked up, creating an agile and clutter free environment, allowing IT managers greater flexibility and manageability

Blade servers are transforming data centers and the overall computing environments. It makes for on demand computing, allowing the data center managers to scale up and scale out computing resources as per demand patterns. RLX Technologies (acquired by HP in 2005) pioneered the concept of blades and came out with the first blade server in 2001. Since then, blade servers have come a long way with all the frontline server vendors offering a slew of blade configurations. Their rise to fame does have a reasonblades came at a time when enterprises were struggling to arrive at optimal server configurations for their needs.

While conventional servers are still in majority in any computing scenario, driving blades is the distinct benefit they bring to the table. Blades bring in a high degree of server manageability, virtualization, simplified network, and storage management. Also, blades consume less power which translates into huge cost savings for enterprises. With these benefits, blades are on the threshold of creating a big impact in the mainstream server space. Right now, blade server applications are largely limited to data centers and high performance computing areas, but in the recent times, vendors have also started to focus on the mainstream and SMB segments.

The SMB Thrust
Experts say that the blade market is doing exceedingly well, and in tune with that, vendors are focusing on more products that are specific. What is more interesting is that even the SMBs have started adopting blades, thus breaking the myth that blades are just for large enterprises. The key selling point in a blade server lies in its lower TCO as compared to tower servers, and it is easier to manage, and has virtualization capabilities with internal storage as well.

Reflecting on this, Shashi B Mal, director, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India and South Asia, says, We intend to make blade servers more attractive to SMB customers. While we have been selling our BladeCenter blades to large enterprises, off late we have started focusing on SMBs as well. The fact that blades house both servers as well as storage is an excellent option for SMBs. Companies like IBM say that SMBs tends to have many computers, and they often buy a machine to do a specific job within their operation. Being able to use blades within a chassis instead of a number of individual machines can make life easier for small businesses.

Why Choose Blades?
Arriving at optimal server density in a relatively small form factor, coupled with greater manageability, makes blades the number one choice for data centers. This means bringing down server footprint that will, in turn, simplify server management. From a functional perspective, blades provide more functionality and greater density as compared to conventional servers. If we look at a typical data center, a primarily challenge is the processing power required to manage compute-intensive applications. So, the infrastructure has to be such that it can take unscheduled load patters, typically in a blade environment. Simply by adding more blades, one will be able to meet those demands.

As computing options continue to grow in the industry standard computing market, emphasis is more on scale up versus scale out. Scaling up means: adding additional computing power through processors, memory and I/O, thereby increasing a systems computing power and making it highly available and reliable for a particular task. Scale out is nothing but stepping down the computing power, as that particular task does not require the set configurations. These requirements are a key deliverable of blade servers, as it makes physical consolidation of the server environment easier.

Looking beyond agility and functionality, the energy efficiency quotient and bringing down power consumption, and arriving at peak performance per watt have become benchmarks of an efficient computing environment. Data centers with many tower servers have to invest quite a bit on air-conditioning to manage the heat generated by servers. Vendors have come out with efficient thermal management methods that have brought down the heat for blades to far less than that of conventional servers.

According to IDC India : With increased consciousness and awareness about cooling and power management and infrastructure costs, blade servers are witnessing definitive acceptability among CIOs. The Indian x86 blade server market was close to 6% of the total x86 server markets (in unit shipment terms) in FY 06-07. This is expected to go up to 11% in FY 07-08, says Sankalp Shrie, senior manager, Enterprise Computing Products Research, IDC India. After penetrating into large enterprises through some big deals and creating a lot of favorable noise about the advantages of blades, MNC server vendors are now focusing on the SMB segment for a continued and sustained growth of blade servers. Vendors are also launching new models to cater to specific needs of the SMB segment, he adds KP Unnikrishnan, director-marketing, Alliances and Tele-Web Sales, Sun Microsystems India, says, The growth in shipments of blade servers can be attributed to an increased awareness among CIOs on the power consumption and space issues of data centers. New products and technologies are also being launched in this space which is increasingly creating awareness amongst users.

Vendors in the Fray
As per an IDC report in August 2007, HP topped the worldwide blade server market in both total blade server units shipped and factory revenue. HP indeed has come a long way on blades, and its escalation has been very rapid since 2002. From Quick Blades to the Blade System, HP has pushed more and more blades in the market. In the Indian context also, HP has had good traction on blades. Its strategy has been two foldblade as a data center, and blade as servers. But HP has been aggressively targeting the data center space, which consumes majority of these servers. Says Rajesh Dhar, country manager, industry standard servers, HP India, Blade is a horizontal x86 server technology that can co-exist with tower servers. It is significant in a data center environment because it brings in a high degree of processing capabilities. It delivers higher TCO and greater RoI on power and efficiency.

Experts say that if one looks at the TCO of blades over a period of three years, an enterprise can accrue more than 35% saving on power consumption and cooling costs alone, which, in a traditional server data center environment, exceeds the acquisition cost of the servers in two years.

Meanwhile, big blue IBM has also made impressive strides in the blade space. According to IBM sources, it is making its blade servers more attractive to SMB customers. Until recently, IBM predominantly aimed its blade center blades at large enterprises, but now the focus has been the SMBs as well. Says Shashi Mal, We are constantly working to bring innovative versions of blade technology with relatively better cooling and power experience, and this has been our primary focus.

The key products IBM has here is its System x and BladeCenter servers, which has features like calibrated vectored cooling technology allowing dual paths of air-to-each component. This improves uptime and longevity and reduces wasteful air movement and heat generation, coupled with more energy efficient power supplies. Company sources claim that its BladeCenter and System x servers generate less heat in the critical AC-to-DC power conversion than many alternative systems from the competition.

Sun Microsystems, which is also growing in stature in this space, has recently launched its Sun Blade 6000 series. Company sources say that with this system, customers can deploy blades across their computing tiers, including mission critical applications. Says KP Unnikrishnan, Just as rack servers gradually supplanted tower servers, we expect blade servers to supersede rack servers over the next three to four years.

There an increased awareness among CIOs of power consumption and space issues of data centers KP Unnikrishnan, director, Marketing, Alliances and Teleweb Sales, Sun Microsystems India	Blade is significant in a data center environment because it brings in a high degree of processing capabilities Rajesh Dhar, country manager, Industry Standard Servers, HP India	From an industry perspective, blades are widely being used in industries other than the early adopters like telecom Suresh Kumar M, product head, Wipro Personal Computing	With blade servers companies save money versus tower and traditional rack servers Shashi B Mal, director, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India & South Asia

Tapping Opportunities
Clearly, every server vendor is focusing on blades and trying to tap the opportunity in data centers and telecom. If one looks at the Indian vendors, Wipro has partnered Intel to address the mid-market customers. Sources at Wipro say that there has been a lot of customer keenness toward a cost effective solution, and it sees huge opportunity from verticals such as retail, education, and other mid-size business customers.

Says Suresh Kumar, product head, Wipro Personal Computing: From the industry perspective, blades are widely being used by businesses in industries other than the early adopters. Typically, trends from last year show that blades were deployed in high density data centers, HPC environments used for clustering and in most cases found to replace rack servers.

From exclusivity a few years back, blade servers have come a long way. In a way, they are changing the personality of servers and redefining the scope of data centers. From an enterprise CIO perspective, justifying the cost of blade servers is less of a challenge now, compared to the early days when blade servers were much more costly. The ease of installation and maintenance makes administration and support much easier. From the application standpoint, blades provide flexibility and are ideal for a range of computing scenarios.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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