Blade servers are perfectly suited for today’s data centers.
Performance and flexibility were the main reasons data center managers migrated to parallel computing and clusters. Corporate data center managers did not just want a simpler infrastructure, they also were moving to parallel computing for performance reasons.
Today’s blade servers – which have evolved exponentially since their early designs in 2001 – are high-power, high-performance systems that offer multiple configurations and choices that can leap beyond the boundaries of today’s data center.
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Technology Insider: Blade Servers
Compared with traditional 1U and multiple rack systems, blades are uniquely adept at managing the rapidly changing data center.
A perfect example of how blades can be used to tackle thorny problems is in the highly critical area of heat dissipation. In 2000, my company, Verari Systems took on a major problem faced by corporate data centers: how to accommodate the increasingly higher-powered processors introduced by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
In 2000, processors were consuming 35 watts of power each, creating 10,000 watts output per cabinet. The processor manufacturers’ road maps showed continued, furious power increases, perhaps even eclipsing 70 watts by 2004.
In actuality, in 2004 processors are at about 90 watts per processor for AMD and north of 100 watts for Intel, resulting in more than 25,000 watts for a cabinet. CPU wattage is expected to increase to 130 watts in 2005.
As microprocessor heat output increases, conventional servers in the top section of data center cabinets become starved for cooling air. This leads to high failure rates and reduced density per rack. Verari Systems’ solution was to develop vertically cooled bladed systems that take advantage of the laws of nature to cool these increasingly powerful processors.
Thermals are not the only problem faced by data center managers. As companies invested large amounts of money into the new frontier of server farms and parallel computing, management issues became prevalent: How to manage hundreds, if not thousands of machines? How to deal with updates and patches? How to keep pace with the ever-evolving operating system changes and latest and greatest hardware updates?
Blade server vendors are addressing these manageability challenges head-on by delivering software to automate operating system and application provisioning and patch management. Blade vendors have developed management capabilities that operate on a massive scale – across thousands of servers – and across multiple vendors’ platforms.
We also are delivering out-of-band monitoring and management capabilities that work even if the network and blade server operating systems cease to function. With the additional benefit of cable management, and the ability to hot-swap servers in seconds, blades also offer a significant improvement in the time and complexity of data center management.
Blade computing brings significant improvements to data center total cost of ownership through improved thermal and power management, monitoring and infrastructure costs, and software and application management improvements.
Dave can be reached at dave.driggers@verari.com .
