Small to medium sized businesses
(
SMBs) traditionally locked out of buying blade servers because
of cost may now be able to buy one -- if they want to.IBM says that it is making available a blade server that is
better suited to an SMB's size and budget than anything previously
on the market.
 | | | | | The original motivation behind
the switch was power constraints. We could not put any more servers
into our datacentre.
Charles Falcone
presidentDevon Health |
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"This is really geared toward the smaller end of the market," said
Clay Ryder, president of analyst firm The
Sageza Group . "If you look at
SMBs, particularly on the smaller side, most blade solutions out
there have been larger than most smaller businesses can take
advantage of with the chassis, the blades, the interconnects. If
they only need a couple blades, all the other overhead is
cost-prohibitive."
IBM announced that BladeCenter S will be available in the fourth
quarter of this year. The system is based on a chassis small enough
to sit on a desk that holds up to six blade servers. It can plug
into a standard 110-volt wall socket, a boon to small IT shops that
are dealing with power capacity problems. The BladeCenter S comes
with a "setup wizard" that simplifies the process of establishing
network and storage connections.
The product also comes with a variety of pre-installed
infrastructure applications that small and medium-sized businesses
(SMBs) can chose from, such as antivirus, firewall,
Voice over Internet Protocol, email, collaboration, backup and
recovery and file and print applications.
"We didn't look at blades as something we could afford," said
Charles Falcone, president of Devon Health Services Inc., a
preferred provider organisation (PPO) based in King of Prussia, Pa.
"We had never really considered them as an option. I think it was
the price point and the understanding that they really weren't
appropriate for small businesses."
Falcone, whose PPO has 130 employees, has been using BladeCenter
S in beta since earlier this year. Prior to that, his datacentre
was at capacity and his company couldn't grow.
"We had a little over 30 servers, primarily HP and Dell servers,
all running different applications, housing data, etc.," Falcone
said. "Six blades will accommodate everything that we had on those
servers. The original motivation behind the switch was power
constraints. We had exceeded the power coming into the building and
our backup generator was maxed out. We could not put any more
servers into our datacentre. We needed to find a new solution."
Falcone said working with BladeCenter has solved his power
capacity problem and also simplified his environment.
"It's much easier to use," he said. "You're going from 30
individual servers all over the place, trying to support each of
these units. Identifying problems, trying to find which unit is
having a problem, versus having six blade servers in one small
rack. It condenses all the support needs. So now we've got help
desk guys looking for things to do. We're able to redeploy them to
other projects that were previously put on the back burner because
they were spending their time fixing problems and supporting
servers. It's a clean solution and we're able to do more on the
business side with respect to growing the company."
Charles King, principal analyst at Hayward, Calif.-based Pund-IT
Research, said other blade vendors, such as Sun Microsystems Inc.
and Hewlett-Packard Co., are selling blade servers aimed at the SMB
market, but those products are still too high-end for smaller
businesses.
"This [BladeCenter S] is the first blade-based solution really
aimed at small businesses," King said. "HP and Sun are focused more
toward the midmarket."
Although the IBM product will work very well for smaller
businesses, King said they might be slow to adopt it.
"Certainly a lot of small businesses really take a tactical,
'whatever is cheapest in this billing cycle' approach to buying
servers," King said. "And blades are very often priced at a
premium. Some of the typical strategies that vendors have been
using to sell blades -- server consolidation, squeezing additional
computing power into smaller and smaller footprints -- those are
issues that don't really concern most small businesses."
Small businesses that want to integrate and simplify their
infrastructure will see the appeal, however. King said small
businesses that keep buying servers and storage piecemeal and
linking everything together with a "nest of wires" will find their
infrastructure harder and harder to deal with.
"What IBM aims to do is take the pain out of server integration
and storage integration," King said.
Small businesses -- those suffering all the problems inherent in
lots of distributed systems -- are the ones looking to deploy blade
servers, he added. But for a larger part of the [small business]
market that sees blades as just another way to do rack servers,
there needs to be education.
"Blades aren't just another replacement for rack servers," King
said. "It's a different way for doing computing solutions. They're
going to be taught and educated."
Let us know what you think about the story; email:
Shamus McGillicuddy,
News Writer