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Blade Computing Comes of Age Click on Executive
Summary, TOC,
References, and keynote
presentation for additional information. |
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Doing More with Less |
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Until recently, most data center computing has been
performed by expensive, monolithic mainframe or UNIX SMP servers, fine tuned
to run few specific workloads efficiently. Pressured by CEOs to “do more with less” in this challenging
economic environment improving the productivity of IT assets has become a top
priority for CIOs, given the average CPU running
around 25% capacity while stranded direct-attached storage being utilized
below 50% in many large companies.
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Deploying a multitude of rack-mount xU-servers,
each running their own OS on their own individualhardware,
has been no solution either, since they could not scale due to lack of a
shared fabric backplane. The real cost reduction opportunity in computing lies in
eliminating monolithic, proprietary servers altogether. Replacing them with
standard high volume, low-cost, modular servers running industry-standard
Windows/Linux OS and augmenting them with advanced access, availability, and
administration functions, emulated from expensive mainframe or UNIX
environments, will bring about the best of all worlds. |
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Market Segmentation by Platform
One of the key contributions offered by the new generation
of blade servers lies in their ability for hardware provisioning through
segmenting server resources at the blade board level. Each of these blade
resources may be allocated to one of the operating system instances while
achieving scalability through simple plug-ins of additional blades. This form
of provisioning provides a high degree of fault tolerance, simplifies the
hardware upgrade process, and allows hardware to be logically partitioned to
run different applications at different performance levels. Thus, a diversity of shifting peak loads can simply be
handled flexibly through software provisioning of these blade resources. This
puts the blade servers at a distinct advantage for adoption in a variety of
environments from small businesses to large enterprises handling a variety of
loads, as compared to the inflexibility of large mainframes/UNIX based SMP
servers best suited only for certain types orkloads. Market Segmentation by Applications The emergence of low-cost Linux/Windows-based volume servers
and clustering/interconnect fabric technologies, together with virtualization
and software provisioning, is allowing blade servers to be adapted in various
applications addressing different vertical markets. These applications
include OLTP, decision support, numeric intensive computing, and streaming
content.
Because of their flexibility to take on software
provisioning, blade servers can easily address various specialized
requirements of Tier 1, 2 and 3 applications, on the Web or in the
Industry standard blades actually facilitate convergence of
computing (channels) and Networks (nodal interconnectivity) to achieve true
distributed computing as epitomized ultimately in grid computing of the
future.
Growth Drivers for Blade Servers
The integrated modular architecture of blade systems
providing Virtualization, Provisioning and Self-Driven Automation capabilities
already are starting to strike a pleasant chord with CIOs. Some of the major growth drivers accelerating the adoption
of blade servers include:
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Click
here for additional information including vender positioning index
(Strategy/Vision vs. Delivery/ Execution) |
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IMEX Research, 1474 Camino Robles San Jose, CA 95120 (408)
268-0800 http://www.imexresearch.com |
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