According to Gartner, 2004 blade server shipments totaled more than 298,000, and the market will grow to an estimated 1.3 million by 2009, generating revenues of $3 billion. IDC is even more optimistic with projections of 2.8 million shipments and $11 billion by 2009.

Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner, sees blade servers matching traditional pedestal and rack systems over the next three to five years.

Packing Heat

“Blades offer an interesting mix of what I think you might call evolutionary and revolutionary technology. On the evolutionary side, blades allow companies to work with server architectures that they’re the most familiar with. On the revolutionary side, blades really provide an almost unprecedented ability for customers to condense their data centers into smaller and smaller footprints,” explains Charles King, Pund-IT’s (www.pund-it.com) principal analyst covering enterprise server, storage, and networking solutions.

This means that data centers can squeeze more computing power into less space. While this reduction in size is a boon to large server farms and data centers, packing all that computing power into a smaller footprint is, unfortunately, generating a significant amount of heat. Due to blade servers’ high power density, providing adequate HVAC in older facilities is presenting challenges. The Uptime Institute predicts that data center heat loads will reach 60,000 watts per square meter by 2010. The Robert Frances Group, business advisors for IT executives, believes that power and cooling will be the No. 1 issue to address during the next four years.

Doug Balog, vice president and business line executive for IBM BladeCenter, stresses that not all blade servers are created equal. To address the growing concerns of growing power and cooling requirements, he says that IBM has created the Cool Blue portfolio, which includes tools that monitor your power consumption in the data center and physical features such as rear door heat exchangers.

Centralized Desktops

Longtime IT veterans are seeing the irony with the push to move the desktop back to the data center, much like pre-PC mainframe computing. Many organizations, especially those in the financial and healthcare industries, as well as government entities, are ditching desktop PCs and moving back into a centralized computing environment. Blade servers, from which virtual desktops are hosted, deliver a variety of advantages, including high availability, better security control, increased manageability, cleaner workspace area, and reduced operating costs.

Texas-based ClearCube has spent the last decade developing an Intel-based PC blade housed in a chassis in a central location while the users connect to their workstations using only a small port device to which physical inputs (monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc.) are connected or through a wireless network connection and a browser.

Blades are managed from an administrative console, ClearCube Sentral, which offers access to rich features, including virtual machine integration, remote BIOS upgrades, active health monitoring, multilevel security configuration, and customized views and reporting. Further adding to ClearCube’s flexibility, Sentral also supports virtualized desktops or other vendors’ blade systems.

Additionally, HP offers a Consolidated Client Infrastructure that provides a centralized solution for desktops aimed at reducing costs and raising security, service quality, and manageability. Paul Miller, vice president of marketing for HP BladeSystem, asks, “Why would anyone want to run a workstation in the data center? Blading the workstation is going to deliver more advantages not possible with a traditional system. With a box under every desk, you have an issue with support, heat, power, security, and flexibility. More and more, you need to support your top employees no matter where they are in the world. This is the next generation of workstation infrastructure because it combines the mission-critical control and security of the data center with a seamless workstation-class experience, along with the flexibility to support professionals in any location.”

IBM was quick to follow with its introduction of its new Workstation Blade at the 2007 IBM PartnerWorld Conference, aimed at taking client computing back to the data center.

Clustering

Clustering for high-availability, load-balancing, high-performance, or grid computing is made easier with blade technologies. Appro specializes in high-performance and enterprise computing markets. The company’s HyperBlade Cluster solution is specifically designed for high-density, high-performance technical computing applications, making Appro popular in numerous verticals, such as the energy, financial, government, and education industries. Appro offers its HyperBlade Cluster in a variety of sizes and configurations. The Mini-Cluster supports up to 17 servers in a single rack, the Mid-Cluster up to 50, and the Full-Cluster up to 80. Each HyperBlade within the rack is a complete server, with its own processors, memory, network controllers, and operating system. Integrated direct connect for power and management is built into the rack.

Data centers also have a choice in processor, as HyperBlades support a variety from Intel and AMD, as well as between Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems.

For those who require a customized blade solution, American ProImage can put together everything from units with 1/2U independent slimline servers to an 8U rack with a 10-node dual-processor system.

In addition to providing end-user products, American ProImage also works with companies to develop OEM/ODM projects.

The Heavyweights

The big computing heavyweights—IBM, HP, Dell, and Sun Microsystems—have all introduced blade technologies into their product lines, looking to leverage current installations as new technologies are adopted. According to Gartner, between IBM and HP, they control about 75% of the blade market, with IBM leading HP by a narrow margin. Many point solutions, however, are starting to build out their solutions on Dell’s PowerEdge blade servers in an effort to eliminate in-house OEM departments. Dell and Sun trail with similar fourth-quarter sales as reported by IDC.

In an effort to set themselves apart from the competition, in 2006, IBM, Intel, and six other companies formed Blade.org, a collaboration of blade platform companies, in an effort to accelerate the process of bringing product to market. Growing to now include nearly 80 blade hardware and software providers, developers, distribution partners, and end users worldwide, IBM is throwing open its doors to deliver the comprehensive solutions companies want.

HP’s Miller counters IBM, “We have two new innovations that advance our blade systems to the next level. HP Blade Agenda, which is to blade, virtualize, and control everything. Customers are able to take their applications and deploy them on the new C-class chassis, connect to their same network, and operate more efficiently, transfer physical infrastructure into virtual pools of resources. Now they can automate, transform, and adapt infrastructure to drive business faster and more affordable.”

Similar to IBM’s Blade.org initiative, HP has more than 220 members of the Blade-System Solution Builder Program helping to build out HP’s blade portfolio. Members include Cisco (www.Processor.com/CiscoSystems), Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), VMware (www.Processor.com/VMware), Citrix (www.Processor.com/Citrix), SAP (www.sap.com), Oracle (www.Processor.com/ORCL), and RedHat (www.redhat.com).

Sun Microsystems has introduced its 8000 P Modular System, with which it promotes density, efficiency, and price. According to Sun, its blades offer up to 16 times the I/O throughput of competing blade servers, while outperforming rackmount servers with up to 67% less space and 43% lower power requirements.

Dell’s PowerEdge Severs are following with the trend to increase manageability, consolidation, security, expansion, and modularity, as well as lower the overall cost of deploying servers, which, of course, is what every data center wants.

by Sandra Kay Miller