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Enterprises today demand flexible server technologies, and
this augurs well for blade servers, which may well emerge as
the next big thing in high performance computingÂ
For any enterprise,
servers form the key
part of the digital ner-vous system, for the enter-prise's entire repository of knowledge resides and gets processed in the servers. As we look into the evolution path of the server, it becomes evident the industry has come a long way from its humble origins. In the formative years, the 1980s, Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC) ruled. The CISCs, though they can process large quantum of instructions, suffered from this very stren-gth, because that slowed down the processing power due to lots of unwanted instructions.
To plug that lacunae, the next logical evolution in com-puting was the Reduced Instru-ction Set Computers (RISC) proce-ssors that cognized only a limited set of instructions, thus hastening the speed of data processing. While RISCs are at the higher end of the spe-ctrum, the dawn of Intel x86 server architectures opened up new realms in the server space. Given the dynamics of the server market, is there a tech-nology that can marry all the server concepts and bring to table a product that is afforda-ble but at the same time very agile and scalable? The answer is blade servers.
When we contrast blade server technology against the conventional server design, it marks a significant shift. Typi-cally a blade is just a mother-board with the processor, which slides into a blade rack that is attached to a back plane. All the blades in the rack share components like fan, power and cabling. While the initial set up cost for a blade is a bit cumbersome, the total running costs and the ease in terms of configuring and re-configuring the blades as per the enter-prises computing demands make it a technology to reckon with. Hence blades are suited for server farms, typically data centers or ISP servers that routinely witness a sudden demand for processing power.
During such scenarios, a redundant blade can be easily configured to meet computing demands. Also, blades occupy less floor space, making it ideal for various environments.
Blade servers, with their inherent advantages, have now become the fastest growing Intel-platform for servers in the world. Since their introduction a few years ago, their popula-tion has been increasing, keep-ing pace with the development of the technology itself. Blade servers are gaining wide acce-ptability in India as well.
Verticals like banking and financial services, digital content creation, and the like, have taken the blade server market out of its telecom intensive domain, for which it was originally created. Accor-ding to IDC, substantial growth in the worldwide blade server market is expected over the next four years.
Blades for All
Any customer who requires Intel Servers can go for blades Anil Sethi, GM, eServer X-series and IntelliStation, IBM India said “Rather than asking who should use blades, the question is, who should not use blade servers. Having said that, I would like to add that the blade servers provide the highest performance density as compared to the normal tower servers or the rack optimized servers available in the market. Therefore they are ideal for processing memory hungry applications.”
IBM, for instance, has insta-lled blades across verticals in India like manufacturing, finan-cial services, oil and gas, digital content creation, engineering design, and computer services industry among others. Blade servers are increasingly mak-ing server technologies availa-ble to the growing enterprises.
This in a way is giving super computing power to ordinary enterprises, which cannot afford conventional standalone servers. Informed Sethi, “Blade servers have emerged as a weapon of choice for fast grow-ing businesses and enables smaller businesses to access supercomputing strength at prices they can afford.”
In India, apart from IBM, Sun Microsystems and HP pursue the blade market aggressively. HP, for instance, has annou-nced a new breed of servers based on the Intel Xeon proce-ssor based on the 64-bit tech-nology, which was formerly code-named Nacona.
According to HP sources, the company is the first server vendor to sell more than 100,000 blades. This makes HP a leader in the blade space, mainly due to the broad portfolio and mix and match of technologies it offers.
Meanwhile with blades all set to become a volumes space in the coming years, players like HP have to fight for market share from other vendors like Sun and IBM. Anil Valluri, Dire-ctor, Client Services Organiza-tion, Sun Microsystems India, quipped “Blades are reshaping how the Indian industry thinks about servers. In the quest to squeeze more computing power into less floor space, Indian companies are buying ever-thinner servers, bolted to racks in collections that resemble six-foot-tall stacks of pizza boxes. Blades take this concept one step further. There is a big potential market in India and at Sun we are extre-mely bullish about our growth prospects in this segment.”
Valluri further added “Like any emerging market there is a lot of excitement about blade technology. Blade servers will provide more firepower for mail and messaging, line of business applications, media streaming and database appli-cations. With their arrival, blades are slowly moving from the edge of the network (mail, web, proxy, firewall) to the middle-tier (applications). They are being deployed in India across the banking, manufa-cturing, telecom and biotech sectors.”
Advantage Enterprise
As we cut through the marketing hype surrounding the blade technology and ponder over the key question on its deliverables to an enterprise, the immediate reply of the vendors is the flexibility in terms of managing the computing power. Said Sethi, “Today one of the big-gest challenges before the CIO is simplification and consolida-tion of the IT infrastructure, which has components like servers, storage, applications, et al. Blades actually make this consolidation a lot easier, as against normal physical conso-lidation (where you keep the servers together), where you get to save very little on the management resources bec-ause you are still managing all the servers. Integration is
the foundation of blade technology.”
Agreeing upon, Arun Gupta, Senior Director, Business Technology, Pfizer India, also added “Blade servers are maturing in technical terms and going forward should encourage building of grids in the enterprise thereby harness-ing the unused power across multiple servers. Moreover, by compressing the form factor, one of the big benefits of bla-des is in space saving over stan-dard rack-mounted servers. Apart from the obvious bene-fits, they also encourage sto-rage separation from servers, which improves utilization of disks.”
Pfizer India is currently operating with legacy servers acquired over a period of time. In the next phase of its con-solidation and renewal, it would be evaluating blades as an option. At the same time, the next cycle will also coincide with the push towards 64-bit computing infrastructure. Thus availability of 64-bit blades will be one of the key factors its adoption. Gupta further said, “The adoption of technology in India is in step with the rest of the world and I strongly believe that organizations that require intense computing power will be giving blade servers a good look in their evaluation.”
The maturing of blade technology is clearly a value proposition for enterprises. However industry sources aver that RISC based blades would be the forte of niche segments like BFSI and telecom com-panies. Said Valluri, “Indian CIOs are as excited like their counterparts worldwide about blades. If you consider a CIO's role today, it has evolved from just taking care of the orga-nization's IT needs to a busi-ness enabler. With that in perspective, the key concern that CIOs have about blades centers around arriving at the seamless integration of a blade environment into their existing data center architecture. Here the selection of the right vendor and careful planning will help the CIO realize the underlying benefits of the blade technology.”
Blade server technology has matured faster than exp-ected and the IDC's projected market size of $3.7 bn by 2008 is a clear indicator of the foreseen adoption of this technology in the days ahead. Moreover, the evolution of 64-bit RISC based blades is also being seen as a turning point and the biggest and best value proposition for enterprises. While the market for the 32-bit server platform is still a burgeoning one, the fear of OS crashes while runn-ing mission critical applica-tions on a 32-bit platform is always there. Given these lim-itations, enterprises centered on 32-bit technologies can now logically migrate to 64-bit RISC blades and derive maximum RoI and TCO. All in all, for enterprise, which does not have any major legacy systems, going in for blades would be the next natural step.
Blades: a value proposition for enterprise