Wanted: Blade server management software

With the devices proliferating, corporate users need ways to manage the hardware.

As users scramble to scrimp and save by putting applications on low-cost blade servers, they are increasingly looking for more sophisticated ways to manage, provision and automate these new environments.

Blade servers - high-density, low-power blade computers - have emerged in the past two years as a less-expensive and space-saving option for corporate users looking to build scalable and redundant data centers. Server blades come in the form of single boards one-eighth the size of a typical 1U server and consume up to 12 times less power.

The use of these low-cost devices - prices can start at $1,000 - is skyrocketing. The Yankee Group reports enterprise and telecom users worldwide spent $95 million on blades in 2002, and the market research firm expects to see the market grow to $3.78 billion by 2006. The growing market for blade servers is driving hardware and software vendors to deliver blade management products.

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As users scramble to scrimp and save by putting applications on low-cost blade servers, they are increasingly looking for more sophisticated ways to manage, provision and automate these new environments.

Blade servers - high-density, low-power blade computers - have emerged in the past two years as a less-expensive and space-saving option for corporate users looking to build scalable and redundant data centers. Server blades come in the form of single boards one-eighth the size of a typical 1U server and consume up to 12 times less power.

The use of these low-cost devices - prices can start at $1,000 - is skyrocketing. The Yankee Group reports enterprise and telecom users worldwide spent $95 million on blades in 2002, and the market research firm expects to see the market grow to $3.78 billion by 2006. The growing market for blade servers is driving hardware and software vendors to deliver blade management products.

"Now, it's the Wild West in terms of managing blades," says Jamie Gruener, a senior analyst at The Yankee Group. "The server vendors themselves are offering provisioning tools, and the systems management vendors are putting out server management modules."

For now, many users opt to manage servers with homegrown tools. Take Ramaswamy Aditya. He says the blade servers he bought from RLX Technologies are easier to manage than the 1U servers also running in his data center.

"All in all the management of the blade servers is far easier than traditional rack-mount servers, the density is greater and the power consumption much lower," Aditya says.

The CTO at Web application hosting company Zapatec in Berkeley, Calif., uses a combination of remote protocol monitoring for applications, such as syslog and SNMP, to gauge blade performance. Aditya also uses an open source operating system called FreeBSD and Linux on the blade servers to perform out-of-band management.

Along with Aditya, Carl Alexander, senior systems and network administrator at TERC, a nonprofit education research and development organization in Cambridge, Mass., says he manages blade servers via the serial console with a "home-brewed secure console server." And he says the system is flexible and scalable, with no need for software instrumentation.

"This system involved hardware costs of less than $50 per host, zero software costs and certainly no more systems administration time than configuring a commercial server management solution," he says.

Blade management basics

Managing blades shouldn't vary much from managing typical servers.

Corporate users want to monitor availability and performance, as well as spot potential hardware problems before they cause downtime. Because blades are hot-swappable they can be a potential management problem. Corporate users must be able to quickly discover new blades, identify the proper configuration and allocate the necessary images to the blades.

Because blades also serve as inexpensive options for branch offices or sit on the edge of the network, network executives must be able to administer blades remotely, which requires certain asset or desktop management capabilities. And while many software vendors such as Computer Associates and BMC Software have tools to manage systems and servers, there are no standards to manage blades.