* More power for blades
It’s safe to say we’re past the hype when it comes to blade servers. Today, blade servers are a reasonable option for organizations that want to make efficient use of their data center space.
But with processing power growing fast, blade servers – and traditional rack mount servers, for that matter – may soon find they don’t have the I/O capabilities to keep up. We can talk about I/O issues more generally in another newsletter, but for this one I want to focus on blade servers specifically.
Today, x86 processors are getting more powerful and organizations are opting to slice up the physical x86 systems into multiple virtual machines to get the most efficient use of CPU power. This is especially true on blades, which are a prime target for virtual workloads. The trouble is that as more applications are put on single physical blades, the ability to move data in and out of the systems can end up being a hang-up.
Vendors are addressing the issue. IBM, for example, last year introduced 10G Ethernet support for its BladeCenter systems.
This month, Blade Network Technologies, a spin-out of Nortel, says it will have the first 10G Ethernet switch for blades. The 20-port Layer 2-3 10G switch is expected to ship from IBM for its BladeCenter H in coming weeks. The device provides six 10G uplinks and 14 downlink connections to individual blade servers, the company says. The switch is priced at just under $9,800.
“With processors becoming so powerful, people are looking to XenSource and to technologies like VMware to be able to carve up their physical machines into multiple virtual machines, and as they do that one of the things that becomes a bottleneck is the network bandwidth that you can get to every individual server blade,” says Vikram Mehta, Blade Network’s president and CEO.
With today’s 2GB or 3GB connections there is a limit to how much bandwidth is accessible to each virtual workload. “What has changed with [our announcement] is you’re now getting native 10G bandwidth to every physical server, which means if you carve up that physical server into multiple virtual machines, you’re getting a lot more bandwidth than customers would traditionally have,” Mehta says.
In addition, Blade Network’s switches are embedded right into the blade chassis, reducing space demands, as well as cooling issues. “The fact that 10G technology is integrated into the chassis solves a lot of wiring issues,” Mehta says.
Check out Blade Network’s new 10G switch here. Check out The Tolly Group’s review of the switch here.
