Blade servers have made their mark on the hardware scene, judging
by the success of the Server Blade Summit in San Jose. A wide range
of vendors, from giants like IBM smaller security vendors such as
Blade Fusion vied for the attention of attendees, well up on last
year's inaugural show.
While sales of blade servers have yet to take off in significant
numbers, the technology has captured a growing following and
provides a new focus for innovation in the hardware industry.
Blade servers first caught the eye of the server world when RLX
Technologies rolled out a system in 2001 that could fit more than
300 servers in a rack that would typically have housed 42 regular
rack servers.
The major server vendors were slow to come up with their own
blade designs and initially challenged the effectiveness of RLX's
newfangled products. Two years later, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell
and Sun Microsystems have all launched blades of various shapes and
sizes and have incorporated the systems into their overall server
strategies.
"It blows me away to think that three years ago this month, we
were sitting in a conference room with a pencil and some paper
designing our first system," said Chris Hipp, founder and former
chief technology officer at RLX, who is credited with developing
some of the early ideas for blades. "Now, three years later, blades
have their own conference, and the big guys in the industry are
giving talks about how blades will change the world."
Blade servers have drawn the interest of vendors for several
reasons. The thin design allows more computing power to be packed
into a smaller space than typical 1U (1.75 inches) rack servers. A
shared networking and power infrastructure helps cut down on the
numbers of cables coming off of a rack. And the compact systems
help cut costs by lessening the amount of space needed in a
datacenter and by reducing power consumption.
The tight confines of a blade server chassis require server
makers to pay special attention to cooling issues and how they set
up their networking and storage infrastructure around the servers.
At the show, Tom Bradicich, chief technology officer of IBM's
xSeries servers, said he expects blade server designs from a
company such as IBM that invests heavily in research and
development to edge out more cost-conscious competitors like
Dell.
"You need to overcome systems management issues and cooling.
These are things that a company without R&D investments will
not be able to enjoy," he said.
Even with its attention to design, IBM, like most of the major
vendors, has not pushed as hard as RLX to cram hundreds of blades
in a rack. Most vendors have come up with designs that save space
compared to traditional rack servers, but not to the extent that
RLX has. Its ability to cram so many servers into a rack stems in
part from its use of low-power Transmeta processors in some of its
blade servers, the company has said.