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A guide to server efficiency

Alan Stevens ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 05 Jun 2007

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Go to section: Performance per watt, multi-core Power management, form factor IBM and blades Virtualisation

IBM and blades
By Bill Holtby

IBM is betting the farm on blades. For IBM, blades are the way forward for servers. They're space-efficient, modular and cost less to run than a standard tower or even a rack server.

IBM's blade server VP Doug Balog reckons that 'Customers want more integration, simplicity, performance and longer-lasting products'.

According to Balog, IBM came to blades by focusing on what it calls server-class technology. 'We then doubled the density for high-performance computing — applications such as the computations required by financial trading houses, oil and gas, and pharmaceutical companies. Now blade technology is now moving into the enterprise infrastructure.'

IBM is also not shy of taking pot-shots at HP, its major competitor in the blade market. 'While we're looking at new ways of using blades, HP, with its c-Class products, is only now in the process of moving customers from racks to blades. They have fewer than 10 per cent of their customers buying blades, while 25 per cent of IBM's Intel/AMD x86 server sales by revenue are blades', says Balog.

So why is everyone buying blades? According to Balog, as recently as three years ago, no customers were talking about power and cooling. 'But two years ago, customers suddenly started talking about this as the big issue and it continues today. Now everyone is interested in green computing.'

Blades aren't just for big enterprises either. 'We see the SMB market ready to explode with blades', says Balog.

Consequently, the company is also preparing to launch a blade server chassis aimed at small to medium-sized businesses — a 'small business' in IBM-speak is one with 1,000 employees or fewer. Expect the product to be a half-sized version of the company's entry-level BladeCenter chassis — perhaps with seven server slots rather than the 14 of its bigger brother, and fewer redundancy features.

Balog says that the IBM advantage is that it can tap into its mainframe heritage to deliver high levels of integration, reduce energy consumption, simplify interconnectivity and deliver central management.

BladeCenter: the heart of the matter
IBM's blade server product line is based around the 14-slot BladeCenter chassis, which it launched in 2002. Last year, IBM launched an upgrade, known as BladeCenter H, which added support for high-speed connectivity such as InfiniBand, along with larger power supplies and cooling systems. It also makes a ruggedised version, the BladeCenter T, which it sells largely to telcos and military establishments, in both standard and high-bandwidth versions.

Into the chassis plug not just servers, but also blades from IBM and others to add features such as communications technology and management. For example, Blade.org founder member Blade Network Technologies sells 10Gbit Ethernet products for the BladeCenter.

Although the BladeCenter chassis have been tweaked since launch to bring them up to date (adding support for DVD drives, for example), they've remained substantially unchanged to ensure backwards compatibility. By contrast HP's server blades are not interchangeable between its two chassis products, the p-Class and c-Class; HP says that this allows users to deploy the latest technology, and not be stuck with older, less capable kit.

IBM's innovation goes into the plug-in devices, which will work inside any BladeCenter chassis. IBM sells blades containing four types of processor. Its x86 devices contain AMD Opterons and Intel Xeons — Xeon-flavoured blades are available only as two-CPU servers, while you can buy Opteron-based servers in both two- and four-way variants. It makes an IBM POWER-based blade that sells into the slow-moving Unix market, plus a Cell processor-based device for multimedia and high-performance computing applications.

Blade.org
IBM puts great store by its Blade.org initiative. It set up the organisation in February 2006 in a bid to win the hearts and minds of hardware and software developers, and encourage them to develop products for its BladeCenter platform. At the heart of the initiative is the publication by IBM of the specifications of its BladeCenter chassis for free, allowing others to develop products around it. It now consists of 92 vendors including AMD, Brocade, Cisco, IBM, Nortel, Intel, Red Hat, VMware and a number of other high-visibility industry names.

According to IBM's Balog at least, Blade.org is achieving its objective, and is now self-funding.

HP, by contrast, only set up its equivalent Blade Connect initiative in April this year. HP reckons it consists of an online community of customers, partners and others with the aim of allowing them to interact and collaborate around its BladeSystem products.

Dell, Sun and others currently share the 20 per cent of the blade market that IBM and HP don't own. But it appears that IBM will have its work cut out to keep up with HP, whose product portfolio appears to have more resonance with enterprise buyers at the moment.

IBM knows that chassis sales today generate sales for blades and accessories tomorrow, so expect a vigorous response. If you're in the market for a blade server system, such intense competition can only be a good thing.

 

Go to section: Performance per watt, multi-core Power management, form factor IBM and blades Virtualisation

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