Vern Brownell, former CTO at Goldman Sachs and the founder of blade-maker Egenera, which focuses on running mission-critical applications, asserts that the different approaches taken by vendors to build blade technology can cross firms up. Some offerings are simply "miniaturized servers," he says, which compromise the design and are "not really built for core data-center applications." Brownell, whose firm's clients include Credit Suisse First Boston, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, warns that a firm could find its network "polluted" by vendor switches that are incompatible with the company's current network.
Brownell says the financial-services industry is in the early stages of blade adoption and he expects it to grow, especially as Linux takes hold. That will put pressure on firms running UNIX. UNIX boxes are expensive, he says, and firms can "take hundreds of proprietary UNIX boxes and collapse them down into a few of our BladeFrames and get huge cost advantages and better reliability."
Akeson agrees that IT managers have to shop carefully for blade solutions, remembering that if a firm has to rework its data center to add power, that has to be taken into the total cost of ownership. "The IBM platform works best for us. I wouldn't say that makes it best for anybody else," he explains. It really depends on a firm's needs, he says, adding that, "Each one of the blade packages comes with something unique that could be a huge asset to different companies, depending on the way the operations group runs."
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