Vendors are hyping blade servers as the latest and greatest, but do you really need them? We put blade servers from three vendors through their paces and find out what the big deal is.To start with, let’s get the obvious joke out of the way: blade servers are cutting-edge technology. Seriously though, what are blade servers, and how will they benefit your organisation?
Blade servers are densely populated servers that are modular and generally rack mountable. They are mostly designed in two parts, firstly they’re in an enclosure that provides power, cooling, and connectivity, then there are anything from two to 20 separate modules or “blades”, each of which is a separate server. By sharing the infrastructure that usually is duplicated in each server—such as power supplies and fans—blade servers take up much less space than regular rack-mounted servers.
They are also engineered to be relatively easy to deploy, configure, and manage via their bundled software and applications. In many cases, the operating system installation, configuration, and administration can be done entirely remotely. They also can maintain some form of future scalability—blades can be simply added to an enclosure as demand requires.
For example, one of the units that we have on test here is an enclosure that is capable of supporting six blades and is only three rack units (RU) in height. A single blade in this particular setup consists of a relatively small metal box that is 400mm deep, 115mm high, and 70mm wide. This box can contain up to two 3.5in format SCSI hard disk drives (HDDs), two central processing units (CPUs), a system mainboard capable of supporting all the above, and also has an integrated ATI video chipset, dual gigabit network adaptors, and a SCSI controller, and also supports up to 4GB of memory. This all slots neatly into a chassis that contains two power supply units, two 10-port gigabit switches, a KVM switch (keyboard, video, and mouse) and all the connectors you would normally expect on the back of a normal server, such as LAN, mouse, keyboard, and video. Therefore one of these models fully populated could have 12 CPUs, 12 HDDs, and 24GB RAM all in a 3RU chassis.
One thing for sure, blade servers seem to be here for the long run with many manufacturers touting them as the next step in the evolution of servers. Commitment, support, and products from companies such as Dell, IBM, HP, Sun, NEC, and even some clone manufacturers are certainly demonstrating that.
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Blade servers
Introduction 1. Dell PowerEdge 2. HP Proliant 3. IBM Eserver Specifications Discussion Scenario About RMIT |
Do you have remotely deployed servers in data centres that you are paying a cost per rack unit? With blade servers you can either pack more servers into the same space that you are currently paying for, or even reduce the space required by replacing existing servers with blade servers.
Another application for blade servers is in a remote office environment. For example say your organisation has a head office and 10 branch offices, instead of deploying several individual stand alone servers in the branches you may choose to deploy a semi-populated blade server enclosure instead. The nature of the design and software behind blade servers is that they can be fully administered remotely. In fact most blade servers come with extremely powerful remote deployment and administration suites of software. This software not only allows you to remotely install most flavours of popular operating systems, but also allows you to configure, clone, restore, and administer these operating systems once deployed. Some even have pre-made server images for particular uses—such as mail server, application server, and Web server, which you can clone on to server blades with a few mouse clicks.
In a branch office environment, this allows technicians to stay in the head office, rather than travelling around the 10 branches working on equipment. And as the individual IT server needs of those branch offices increase, it is a simple matter to order and install another blade into the chassis. And should a single server fail, a spare can be kept on-site or even in the enclosure/chassis ready to remotely power up and take over from the failed unit until service/support help is available to take care of the faulty unit.
The first adopters who have benefited from this blade technology have been the telecommunications companies and data centre hosting services such as ISPs and application/server/storage providers. They saw the benefits of being able to squeeze more servers into the same amount of space, and saved on overheads such as power, LAN cabling, switches, installation, configuration, administration, and maintenance.
Banks and financial institutions also have benefited from this technology using the relative security of keeping data servers in-house at some branches, yet not needing a full time IT engineer on-site preferring instead to utilise the integrated and well-developed remote capabilities that these servers offer.
In addition to the three vendors we reviewed here, we also invited Advantech and NEC to participate, but neither were able to submit a product in time. Let’s take a look at the servers we were sent for testing.
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