Blade servers are hot!

Whitepapers Against a backdrop of awful server revenues and shipments, Blade server sales continue to grow, accounting for 20 per cent of server shipments today, according to the industry body Blade.org. The blade server is the 'pile 'em high , sell 'em cheap' box du jour for all those penguin-killing data centres popping up …

Back to the article

This topic is closed for new posts.

Posted Wednesday 4th November 2009 14:22 GMT

Nate Amsden

more ram #

I think it's all about more ram and virtualization. That is the early blades often had two or four DIMM slots making expansion fairly costly. Now most have at least 8 putting them on par with most previous generation 1U servers. Also with virtualization there's of course the move to more centralized storage on SAN or NAS so lack of local I/O isn't as much of an issue anymore. Most modern 1U systems now have 12-16 DIMM slots, HP and I think Sun both have half height blades that have 16 DIMMs too keeping them up to speed with their 1U counterparts. Not sure about IBM, Dell did not have more than 8 last I checked.

For me at least in the early days the memory slots was the killer for the blades, not enough so wasn't worth using them. Power usage was quite a bit less important(even now) on small scales at least(1-2 chassis).

Posted Wednesday 4th November 2009 14:54 GMT

Hermes Conran

DC backbone? #

Why are these things still running their own power converters? I can't understand why the likes of Rackspace haven't made more of a commercial impact.

Flames cuz it's hot, hot, hot!

Posted Wednesday 4th November 2009 15:53 GMT

toughluck

Sun #

Sun offers up to 32 DIMM slots on their blades (4-socket Opteron X6440 and 2-socket T2+ T6320). With Nehalem, it's either 18 or 24 DIMM slots (4-socket X6275).

Posted Wednesday 4th November 2009 16:03 GMT

ElReg!comments!Pierre

Penguin _relocation_ #

"for all those penguin-killing data centres popping up across the planet."

I think you'll find it's just a relocation matter: from the cold inhospitable ice deserts to the insides of comfy penguin-powered boxen with shiny lights... well of course there's this slightly stingy "grind'em to powder" step, but Apple does the same for their pixie-powered machines and no-one objects. MS is safe on the ethics front (since you were going to ask) as no-one likes maggots to begin with.

Posted Wednesday 4th November 2009 16:15 GMT

Captain TickTock

DC backbone? #

"Why are these things still running their own power converters?"

Redundancy and resilience, my dear boy. A single power converter would be a single point of failure, much like putting lots of servers in one box.

Oh, wait a minute...

Posted Wednesday 4th November 2009 21:18 GMT

Anonymous Coward

blade.org is not an industry body #

It's IBM's own blade ecostructure.

You'll note that HP and Dell are not members.

Posted Thursday 5th November 2009 10:09 GMT

David Halko

Redundant Power Supplies on the Sun blades... #

Hermes Conran, "Why are these things still running their own power converters?"

Captain TickTock ,"Redundancy and resilience, my dear boy. A single power converter would be a single point of failure, much like putting lots of servers in one box. Oh, wait a minute..."

The Sun platforms offers redundant power supplies with their racks... but El Reg decided to ignore Sun blades, again, in their articles.

http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/6000chassis/gallery/index.xml?t=1&p=1&s=1

Posted Thursday 5th November 2009 15:28 GMT

Adam 61

RE: David Halko #

David,

I suspect this is because SUN has very limited market share compared with HP, IBM and Dell in the Blade segment.

Check out Gartners assessment and latest magic quadrant if you don't believe me! They class them as a Niche player due to their current limited market penetration compared to the Big 3.

PS there are other Blade vendors as well if you want to take up their case i.e. Fujitsu, Hitachi, Verari, Liquid and others

This topic is closed for new posts.

Forums

Forums home