You can use these server blades for almost any kind of data processing need that you might have, according to Pat Buddenbaum, Intel's product line manager for the Intel Blade product line. "We see three segments," he said. "In the enterprise, for small and medium business and for high-performance computing."
He noted that the SMB segment is something of a surprise, but "We have seen them in remote locations, and for new installations. Blades make an interesting play for those retail applications." He lists, for example, a branch bank that may need local computing, but doesn't have an IT expert on site. Because of the simplicity of installation and replacement, and the lack of a single point of failure, he says, a blade server installation may be a good choice.
The main benefit of the blades, of course, is their size advantage. When you can get that many servers into a 7U space, you're ahead of the game, compared with a standard rack-mount server, or a box server. And with the space advantage comes a complexity advantage. Estimates are that you can save something like 83 per cent of the cabling that you would otherwise use if you go to a server blade solution. And the cooling load will be reduced, although Buddenbaum notes that with that many servers in one place, you can develop hot spots that will require some additional air-handling capability.
Not to be forgotten is the ease of management and installation for these blade servers. Management is built into the chassis, as is the connection to the rest of the network, and you can manage them over the Internet from any other computer workstation.
All those features make a compelling argument that server blades might have a place in your data center's future. In a follow-on article coming in May, we'll compare server blades from different manufacturers, and highlight features/capabilities that might make one product more apt to fit your needs than another.
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