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GCN Home > 07/02/07 issue

Blade technology moves closer to mainstream

Potential for saving space and power makes blades viable for general use

By Rutrell Yasin

Agencies looking to meet goals for server consolidation and power saving could begin adopting blade server technology more widely, industry experts say. Some defense and civilian agencies already have installed blade systems, and industry seems to be getting ready for more.

In the past month alone, vendors have introduced products ranging from a next-generation, high-performance blade computing platform to an integrated blade computing system for smaller organizations.

SGI last week unveiled the Altix ICE 8200, the first in its new line of blade servers built to handle high-performance computing applications and large-scale workloads.

Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems earlier in the month introduced the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System, which is designed to integrate easily and without proprietary tools into existing data centers and management systems.

And IBM rolled out the IBM Blade Center S, an integrated blade computing system, to help smaller organizations reduce IT administration. The Blade Center S integrates applications used in business functions such as antivirus/firewall, voice over IP, e-mail, collaboration, backup and recovery, and file and print applications.

Blade servers have been on the market for about five years, but until recently users tended to view them as specialized systems for niche areas rather than general-purpose systems, said Clay Ryder, president of the Sageza Group. But now, users are warming up to what blades offer, he said.

Among the big factors driving this newfound interest in blade technology are server consolidation and the green computing issue, said John Slye, manager of the federal industry analysis program at Input, a market research firm that focuses on government.

Agencies want to free up floor space in data centers filled to capacity with computing equipment, reduce power consumption and manage an explosion of data, he said.

Blade servers — chassis with multiple thin, modular circuit boards, or blades, which can be dedicated to single applications — are designed to offer more processing power using less rack space. Each blade can include one or more processors, memory, storage or network connections. However, they share the chassis’ common power and air supply resources.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Enterprise Architecture, Hardware, IT Management



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