Blade Trends

William Van Winkle

3/10/2009

According to the Blade.org consortium, three "mega-trends" are now reshaping the landscape of enterprise computing. The first of these is network convergence of all storage and data communications onto Ethernet, thereby eliminating today's diversity of connector and switch types. This plays well in a down economy because a unified Ethernet infrastructure bringing technologies such as iSCSI and eventually FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) onto a single fabric will reduce total operating cost. Also consider that many blade chassis need a Fibre switch to fit into an existing Fibre-based SAN environment. If data centers can leverage 10 Gigabit Ethernet in this role, it will reduce overall complexity and lower the barrier costs on blade adoption.

Next, look for increasing consolidation of hardware resources, particularly when done in conjunction with virtualization. Up to present, this has mostly been done with legacy server systems, but look for the trend to expand so that blade deployments will fuel server, workstation, and network device systems throughout the enterprise.

"We're seeing an increase in traction between blades and virtualization," says Barb Goldworm, president and chief analyst at Focus Consulting. "The last information we have says that people looking to virtualize were 50/50 split between virtualizing on blades and virtualizing on rack servers. Add to this that half of the blade and rack servers sold in 2008 were sold as platforms for virtualization."

Goldworm notes that the blade trend itself is changing how manufacturers build their products. Whereas blades have historically been in line with or trailed behind their conventional 1U/2U counterparts in terms of horsepower, vendors are now purpose-building their products specifically for virtualization, loading configurations with more CPU cores, memory, network adapters, and host bus adapters.

The third mega-trend working for blades is energy efficiency. HP (www.hp.com) Technologist Christian Belady argues that energy costs exceeded the cost of data center servers last year, meaning that the annual cost of a typical 1U server's energy consumption now outweighs its amortized price tag. By 2014, he maintains, infrastructure and energy costs will be 75% of the total cost, while IT is only 25%.

Blade architecture is inherently more power-efficient owing to its shared power supplies and cooling subsystems. The question going forward is how to cool blade systems more efficiently in order to save more money. Blade.org indicates that in-row cooling, which would tackle server hot spots at their source rather than the room perimeter, will gain in popularity.

The Blade Alternative

Blades are often viewed as a denser alternative to stacking 1U systems in a rack. The trouble is that blades often entail a steeper up-front purchase cost, primarily due to their highly integrated enclosure systems. Debate continues on whether or not blades are cheaper when purchased with the enclosure at least half-populated, but real-world sales may decide the matter.

"Blades were strong all the way through third quarter of last year, but demand significantly dropped in the fourth quarter," says David Bryan, co-founder of server manufacturer Silicon Mechanics (www.siliconmechanics.com). "Interestingly, though, while blade demand declined, requests for twin systems stayed constant."

Twin systems pack two motherboards into a single rackmount case, typically a 1U or 2U. Their advantages include having two servers share one power supply, the potential for same-chassis redundancy, and often higher processing density. The oft-cited downside is that if one piece of the chassis fails, two servers go down. However, a new trend in twin design may remedy this-the "twin-quad."

"In a 2U space, you have four systems," explains Tau Leng, general manager of marketing and HPC for server manufacturer Supermicro (www.supermicro.com). "We call those kinds of systems the poor people's blades. You're sharing the power supplies and the cooling system, and with the latest generation of systems, you can hot-swap. So basically it's a blade, only costed down and in a different form factor. Instead of 10 or 14 units in an enclosure, you get four."

Naturally, blades, twins, and twin-quads can all leverage the benefits of more energy-efficient components. The latest processors based on 45nm fabrication are natively more watt-friendly, and some companies offer low-voltage models within this group that don't significantly sacrifice computing performance. Similarly, some memory manufacturers are better than others at designing lower-voltage DIMMs. Also expect power supplies that adhere to top-caliber 80 PLUS (www.80plus.org) qualifications to become increasingly popular. Already, 80 PLUS GOLD is becoming the desired specification in blades and rackmount servers. GOLD certification requires 87% efficiency under 20% load, 90% efficiency at 50%, and 87% at 100% load. Of the 1,203 power supplies certified by 80 PLUS as of this writing, only 18 are GOLD-certified.

The Management Factor

Remote management is a common part of enterprise server deployments, but how this management gets used is also likely to change in the near future. Expect power management, virtualization management, and system management software to all operate in tandem. For example, an enterprise's workload levels may plummet during night hours, requiring only 50% of the physical resources needed during the day.

"Virtualization management software can consolidate many systems onto, say, two physical boxes, shut down those other boxes, and set the group on a schedule to resume daytime workload configuration an hour before the start of business," says Focus Consulting's Barb Goldworm. "We're starting to see the beginnings of that get implemented. All of the pieces aren't available from all of the vendors yet, but that's the direction things are going."

by William Van Winkle for Processor.com

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Blade Trends

William Van Winkle

3/10/2009

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Blade Trends

William Van Winkle

3/10/2009

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