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Blade computing is not just about a new server form factor
Blade computing is a new computing architecture, providing a highly dense, scalable and powerful flexible platform to support an organization's software needs.
Business benefits are manifold
Blade computing does not only provide the means for more compact centralized data centers, but also increasingly addresses power and cooling concerns, as well as providing a highly flexible, long term platform for an organization's computing needs
The key to blade computing is in the engineering of the total system
Each blade has to interact with other blades around it, and this requires specialized chassis with high performance connections ("busses") built in to the system. The chassis also needs to allow for adequate power and cooling provision.
Each blade can be focused on a highly specific workload
Although general purpose blades are available, specific blades aimed at security, caching, memory, storage and network connectivity are becoming more widely available. Also, each compute blade can run different operating systems, and can be tuned for specific workloads.
Blade computing enables high levels of investment protection
A blade chassis should be forwards and backwards compatible with the same vendor's blades, so ensuring that new investments will be able to fit alongside existing ones. Also, older investments can be cascaded to support lower importance workloads, extending the lifetime value of individual blade components.
The "ilities" are fully catered for with blades
Availability, scalability and manageability are all catered for within a blade system. Each component is capable of being replaced with the overall system still running, and as extra scalability is required, new components can be added dynamically to the system.
The overall cost of blade computing will be lower
Blades make the most of utilizing commodity sub-components – standard CPUs, disk drives, network interfaces and so on. Therefore, initial and ongoing costs are lower. Also, vendors at the sub-component and assembly level have worked hard on power requirements, such that the equivalent blade compute power will need a fraction of the power (and therefore the cooling) of a standard server farm. Also, due to the density of the system, data centers can be smaller, driving down the needs for space cooling even further.
Blade computing offers a flexible platform for utility computing
The dynamic nature of a blade computing platform means that it is ideal for providing the underpinnings for strategic technical approaches such as service oriented architectures (SOAs) or grid computing.
Conclusions
Blade computing creates great opportunities for businesses to optimize existing infrastructures and to prepare for new strategies such as SOA to support the business. The highly modular nature of a blade system means that investment protection will be high, while the flexible nature of the various blade components is well suited to meeting the ongoing dynamic changes within an organization's business processes.
1. Introduction
As the falling costs of communications and logistics have made historically local organizations capable of carrying out global business, the need for the technology underpinning the business to be flexible has never been greater. The need to introduce new products and services to the markets with ever shortening lifecycles means that the chosen technology has to be seen as a business facilitator, not as a solution in itself. However, the rapid pace of change in the past has led to technology-led systems that have created an IT environment with "silos" of different hardware, operating systems, applications and storage. This in itself has led to underutilization of resources such as CPU and storage, and an over resilience on human resources to manage such complex environments. Although consolidation and rationalization projects have been carried out in the past, there is still much that can be done. This non-optimized growth of IT has also led to another problem – that of asset management. Previous Quocirca research has shown that the number of servers and other hardware assets an organization believes it has can be +/- 20% from the actual number. This lack of asset visibility has not only the obvious license and maintenance issues, but also an impact on the depreciation of capital goods held by the organization that has to be declared in the corporate accounts.
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