Blades

The latest Holy Grail of  enterprise IT is server consolidation. Currently there are interconnected trends of achieving higher density in datacenters:

• Virtualization. The idea of virtualization is to consolidate small and not very loaded servers into fewer and larger as well as more heavily-loaded physical servers.  This can bring up a whole new set of complications and new risks. There is no free lunch and you need to pay for additional complexity, usually with stability.  Like with junk bonds if overdone such an investment that can lead to losses instead of gains.  But in moderation this new trend that can be called conversion of IT environment into set of  Virtual Machines can be quite beneficial and opens some additional, non-foreseen avenues of savings.  Other things equal virtualization belongs to OS vendors and using virtualization provided by the vendor is safer that third party virtualization solution. That means that from 1000 feet distance we would suggest that Microsoft Server 2008 might eventually be preferable to VMware for virtualization of Windows servers.
• Blade servers. Blades also can be considered to be more cost and energy efficient alternative to low end servers and as we will discuss later blades as a pretty attractive alternative to virtualization of low end servers.  Some new types of blade servers such as  Dell PowerEdge C5220 Microserver approach in cost licensing costs of VMware without negative consequences of using virtual machine.

Still with recent Intel 8 and 10 core CPUs and fast memory (1899 and 2.1GHz) a lot of saving can gains by using smaller, even one socket blades. Still a dual socket blade with say, two eight core CPUs and 32GB of RAM costs slightly less that two servers with one eight core CPU and 16GB RAM in each. 

At the same time the heavy reliance on virtualized servers for production applications, as well as the task of managing and provisioning them, are fairly new areas in the "new brave" virtualized IT world and both need higher level of skills then "business as usual" and special software solutions. Both add to costs.  Also when virtualization is expensive like is the case of VMware cost benefits can be realized only with oversubscription. 

Blades

Blade servers are an increasingly important part of the enterprise datacenters, with consistent double-digit growth easily outpacing the overall server market. IDC estimated that 500,000 blade servers were sold in 2005, or 7% of the total market, with customers spending $2.1 billion. 

While blades are not virtualization in pure technical sense, the rack with blades (bladesystem) possesses some additional management capabilities that are not present in stand-alone U1 servers and in modern versions usually have shared I/O channel to NAS.  Still they can be viewed as "hardware factorization" approach to server construction, which is not that different from virtualization. They share with virtualization one shortcoming: they are less stable then standalone servers.  Unexplainable crashes of several blades (running different OSes) were observed on HP blades.  ILO 3 used in HP blades is buggy and is a source of significant additional problems that diminish its value proposition.

The first shot in this direction is the new generation of bladesystems like IBM BladeCenter H system has offered I/O virtualization since February, 2006. Next were HP BladeSystem c-Class. The latter offers marginally better server management (via enclosure manager), and can save up to 10-20% of power in comparison with the equal number of rack mounted 1U servers with identical CPU and memory configurations.  Please note that those saving as pre-paid by customers in a form of blade chassis cost, so they go to HP not to customer pockets.

Blades are also cost effective solution as you do not pay for viral manager support like in the case with VMware. Typical blade is $2-4K and enclosure for 16 blades is appox 20K so it adds another $1.25K per blade. So "real" cost of the blade is around $3-$5K which is equal or higher then comparable 1U servers. So blades does not win over 1U servers in cost or performance but they do win in energy consumption and management. Also enclosures provide infiniband connections between blades so it is national to create clusters.  

Sun also offers blades but it is a minor player in this area.  It offers pretty interesting and innovative Sun Blade 8000 Modular System  which target higher end that usual blade servers.  Here is how Cnet described the key idea behind the server if the article Sun defends big blade server 'Size matters':

Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, the company's top x86 server designer and a respected computer engineer, shed light on his technical reasoning for the move.

"It's not that our blade is too large. It's that the others are too small," he said.

Today's dual-core processors will be followed by models with four, eight and 16 cores, Bechtolsheim said. "There are two megatrends in servers: miniaturization and multicore--quad-core, octo-core, hexadeci-core. You definitely want bigger blades with more memory and more input-output."

When blade server leaders IBM and HP introduced their second-generation blade chassis earlier this year, both chose larger products. IBM's grew 3.5 inches taller, while HP's grew 7 inches taller. But opinions vary on whether Bechtolsheim's prediction of even larger systems will come true.

"You're going to have bigger chassis," said IDC analyst John Humphries, because blade server applications are expanding from lower-end tasks such as e-mail to higher-end tasks such as databases. On the more cautious side is Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff, who said that with IBM and HP just at the beginning of a new blade chassis generation, "I don't see them rushing to add additional chassis any time soon."

Business reasons as well as technology reasons led Sun to re-enter the blade server arena with big blades rather than more conventional smaller models that sell in higher volumes, said the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's top server executive, John Fowler. "We believe there is a market for a high-end capabilities. And sometimes you go to where the competition isn't," Fowler said.

As a result of such factorization more and more functions move to the blade enclosure. As a result power consumption improves dramatically as blades typically use low power dissipating CPUs and all blades typically share the same power supply that in case of full or nearly full rack permits power supply to work with much greater power efficiency (twice of more efficient then on a typical server). That cuts air conditioning costs too. also newer blades monitor air flow and adjust fans accordingly. As a result energy bill can be 66% of the same number of U1 servers or even less. 

Blades generally solves the problem of memory bandwidth typical for most types of virtualization except domain-based. Think about them are predefined partitions with fixed amount of CPU and memory. Dynamic swap of images between blades is possible.  Some I/O can be local and with high speed solid drives very reliable and fast. That permits offloading OS-related IO from application related I/O.  Blades also presents some technical problems (amount of heat dissipated by blades is substantial and small volume of the blade presuppose usage of energy efficient CPUs and low voltage memory), but they are at least theoretically solvable. Still you pay the price even in this case as reliability of blade-based solution typically is less then standalone servers. In other words there is no free lunch.

Think about them are predefined (fixed) partitions with fixed number of CPUs and size of memory. Dynamic swap of images between blades is possible. Some I/O can be local as blade typically can carry 2 (half-size blades) or 4 (full size blades) 2.5" disks. With solid state drive being a reliable and fast, albeit expensive alternative to tradition rotating hardrives and memory cards like ioDrive local disk speed can be as good as better as on the large server with, say, sixteen 15K RPM hardrives.

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Last modified: March, 12, 2019