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Bringing advantages in price/performance, power and cooling, reduced floor space, and management and control, blades are proving themselves to be the form factor of choice for many large-scale server deployments. Blades are the fastest growing segment of the server market, with sales increasing at more than 30% a year, and are expected to account for approximately one-quarter of global server shipments by 2011. Through miniaturisation and shared components (power, cooling, network switches), the compact form factor means that greater server densities are achievable through blades. As a result, the initial attention on blades was focused on server centralisation and consolidation. Today, however, it is recognised that the modular, pre-wired architecture of blades reduces complexity and cost and improves flexibility, availability, manageability, and maintainability. This paper examines how these attributes are applicable in the “non data centre” environments found in branch offices, and in small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) where space, power and IT expertise may all be at a premium.
The term “small and medium-sized business” (SMB) is used to refer to a market that is larger than the small office/home office (SOHO), but smaller than large enterprises; in the European Union and international organisations, “small and medium-sized enterprise” (SME) is often used. Although there is no universal definition for SMB (every company has its own) SMBs are often defined in terms of headcount or turnover being below certain limits. For example, the EU categorises companies with fewer than 50 employees as “small”, and those with fewer than 250 as “medium”, whilst in the US “small” usually refers to businesses with less than 100 employees, and “medium” is used for those with less than 500. From an IT viewpoint, it is more useful to consider the size and complexity of a company_s IT requirements; for example, the number of “information workers”, servers or networked PCs. Whatever the definition, SMBs constitute an important and dynamic segment of the economy, and are responsible for driving innovation and competition in many sectors. In the EU, SMBs represent approximately 99% of all firms and three-quarters of the total workforce. According to figures from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, at the start of 2006 there were an estimated 4.5 million private sector business enterprises in the UK; of these, 99.3% were small (0 to 49 employees), 0.6% were medium-sized (50 to 249 employees) and 0.1% were large (250 or more employees).
UK private sector enterprises employ an estimated 22.4 million people, and had an estimated combined annual turnover of £2,600 billion; small and medium-sized businesses together accounted for almost 60% of the employment (Figure 1) and 52% of this turnover.
A problem commonly faced by SMBs is that often they are too small to have the central support functions of a larger company, and yet they are often subject to the same requirements. For example, most small UK-based businesses will not have a dedicated human resources function, but still have to grapple with the finer points of UK and EU employment legislation, such as dismissal and grievance rules, redundancy, maternity/paternity leave and pay, right to request flexible working, working time regulations, discrimination regulations, national minimum wage, statutory minimum holiday entitlement, and work permits. According to the UK_s Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), nearly 80% of small business owners have to deal with the paperwork relating to employment legislation themselves and, on average, spend more than seven hours per week filling in forms. That means time spent away from the core activities of their business; the day-to-day operating, innovating and growing of the business. Managers of SMBs are busy people; the last thing they want is to have their lives further complicated by activities, however necessary, which are peripheral to their main purpose of driving the business forward. Even as IT is becoming more integral to the way many SMBs run their businesses, it is important that, in addition to IT being dependable, it is simple to implement, use and support.
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