Users banking on blades

Greater Baltimore Medical Center had a dilemma. Its IT needs were growing, but its data center space was not. After months of dead-end negotiations with vendors in an attempt to put multiple applications on fewer, bigger boxes, the nonprofit turned in the other direction: It brought in blade servers.

"There were three business problems that really drove us toward the technology: One, we had no space in our data center, and we needed to add 30 servers. Two, we had [limited] power, and we needed to add 30 servers. And three, we were out of air conditioning capacity, or very close to it, and we needed to add 30 servers," says Eric French, network manager at the healthcare organization.

"We needed technology that was low-output HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning], had low power requirements and was very small," he says. "Blades fit that bill."

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Greater Baltimore Medical Center had a dilemma. Its IT needs were growing, but its data center space was not. After months of dead-end negotiations with vendors in an attempt to put multiple applications on fewer, bigger boxes, the nonprofit turned in the other direction: It brought in blade servers.

"There were three business problems that really drove us toward the technology: One, we had no space in our data center, and we needed to add 30 servers. Two, we had [limited] power, and we needed to add 30 servers. And three, we were out of air conditioning capacity, or very close to it, and we needed to add 30 servers," says Eric French, network manager at the healthcare organization.

"We needed technology that was low-output HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning], had low power requirements and was very small," he says. "Blades fit that bill."

The medical center, which deployed 30 HP BL20p blades earlier this year, is one of a growing number of companies turning to blade servers to get the computing power they need in smaller packages. While blades failed to take off as predicted after blade server pioneers RLX Technologies and Egenera introduced them in 2001, they are gaining momentum, analysts say.

Blade evolution

IDC reports that U.S. blade server sales in the first quarter this year totaled $47 million, eclipsing about $43 million in revenue logged for all of 2002. IDC expects the market is expected to reach $6 billion by 2007.

Blades initially were targeted at service providers and large corporations looking to pack a lot of computing power into small spaces. Today, all the major systems vendors are peddling these slices of processing power as a cost-effective way to consolidate data center infrastructure, get rid of masses of cabling and streamline management. Blades - which are about one-eighth the size of a standard 1U server, but require less power - sit in specialized chassis that enable them to share resources.

Buying one or two blades, however, won't save you money. Because individual blades today are priced about the same as comparable 1U servers and users also must pay for the blade chassis, which at IBM, for example, starts at $2,800, the savings come only when customers bring in multiple blades, users say.

First-generation blades were simply stripped-down versions of standard servers and had little in the way of additional features, but that is changing as vendors add more intelligent switching, enhanced network connectivity and storage links.

While businesses are looking more seriously at this new breed of server, challenges remain. Early adopters point to benefits such as cost efficiencies, space savings and manageability, but also note that there still is work to be done in areas such as network connectivity, switching and storage.

"There are limitations now, in September 2003, but they will get relieved over time," says Daniel Kaberon, director of computer resource management at Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting and outsourcing firm in Lincolnshire, Ill.

Hewitt uses grid software on IBM's BladeCenter to spread the load across blades running a pension-benefit calculator engine that provides information on its Web site. Because traffic to the site can spike unexpectedly, he says blades make it easy to meet demands. "As the workload grows, we can simply add more blades," he says.

As for network limitations, "I could talk about limitations in network switches, but I know there are new network switches under development," Kaberon says.HP, IBM and RLX all recently announced network enhancements to their blade servers to make it easier for corporate users to integrate blades into their infrastructures.

It's these kinds of enhancements that have companies considering blades as a more integral part of their data center architectures. Greater Baltimore Medical Center had initial concerns about its blades because the first generation did not connect to storage-area networks (SAN). HP rectified that when it announced connectivity to SANs earlier this year. Today, Greater Baltimore's French says the plan is to standardize on blades.

"Unless there is an absolutely compelling reason not to, meaning there's some application that needs a PCI slot, then it will be a blade," he says.

French says learning to run the blades was about as easy as learning to run any new server.