Cutting to the Core Issues About Blades

By Geoff Koch

August 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 8)
“Think of it in these terms,” says Steve Hill, an avuncular Wisconsin-based technology writer, consultant and frequent speaker on the blade server conference circuit. “Grab your wife’s hair dryer, aim it at yourself and turn it on at full temperature, then imagine five more blowing at you.”

Hill, an avid Green Bay Packer fan who the frequents the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field during football season, is talking about the other side of the temperature scale—extreme heat, a phenomenon he says is blade technology’s Achilles' heel

Assuming each runs at about 1kW, those six hair dryers going all at once, the resulting heat would be about as much as is generated in a typical rack and tower server. That’s heat, of course, that most data center managers have, through the years, learned to deal with by cobbling together approaches to cooling the server room, which in many businesses is one big, mostly homogeneously chilled space.  

“Now, with blades, because the density is increasing, all of a sudden you can get 25kW in a rack,” says Hill. “And most data centers aren’t really designed to be able to deal with that kind of heat.”

Hill’s observation throws cold water on the triumphant claims coming from the big blade vendors, all of which readily point out that the ultra-thin slices of modular computing power are by far the hottest segment of a mostly stagnant global server market. Gartner Research predicts that, in terms of units shipped, the blade server market will grow at a compound annual rate of 19 percent from 2007 to 2012, pacing the overall market, which is slated to grow at a paltry 5 percent during the same time frame.

However, that same report warns that “dramatic growth does not translate to market domination,” forecasting that, despite these impressive sounding gains, by 2012 blades will still only account for one in five server shipments worldwide.

At the roughest cut, the first step in deciding whether to jump into the good news/bad news blade market is to look at a well-worn lists pros and cons, and decide which side of the ledger elicits the strongest gut response. Are you squeezed for space, drowning in cables and ever fearful of the next server outage? Or are you wary of vendor lock-in, content to let others work out the inevitable kinks associated with still-new technology, and happy (or stuck) with the current physical configuration and cooling capabilities of your data center?

Heat: The Downside of High Density
In the larger war between the big server vendors, one battle that IBM almost certainly has won is for the most memorable series of data center-related ads sprinkled across television and the Web featuring Gil, the hapless, slightly overweight hero.

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