 What
are blade servers?
Affordable
Density - Fast
Deployment - Easy
Maintenance
- Modular
Scalability
- Flexible
Availability - Technical
Ramifications
Slim, hotswappable blade servers fit in a single chassis like
books in a bookshelf and each is an independent server, with
its own processors, memory, storage, network controllers,
operating system and applications. The blade server simply
slides into a bay in the chassis and plugs into a mid or backplane,
sharing power, fans, floppy drives, switches, and ports with
other blade servers.
The
benefits of the blade approach will be obvious to anyone tasked
with running down hundreds of cables strung through racks
just to add and remove servers. With switches and power units
shared, precious space is freed up - and blade servers enable
higher density with far greater ease.
Read
on to learn more about this amazing advance in enterprise
systems management.
Affordable
Density
With a large number of high-performance server blades in a
single chassis, blade technology achieves high levels of density.
Even greater expansion is possible through option modules;
performance and density are balanced, leveraging the infrastructure
for optimum utility.
And
all this performance and density are highly cost-effective.
Increased density means fewer racks. Fewer components are
duplicated. The number of cables is reduced dramatically;
in some cases, switches and power distribution units are fewer
too. Fewer components help add up to fewer items that can
fail or need repair, and modular scalability helps spread
capital equipment costs over time. Many day-to-day expenses
- power and cooling requirements, assembly and installation
hours, floor-space square-footage - are designed to be lessened
by blade architecture
Fast
Deployment
In blade technology, new servers are deployed by sliding blades
in and out of a chassis. Each blade server connects to the
infrastructure components in the chassis, so most blade-server
designs require no plugging of multiple cables into each server
as it is installed.
In
advanced blade server systems, the software end of deployment
is enhanced too. Slide a blade into a profiled bay - the system
automatically loads a designated operating system and application
image into the blade; the server is designed to get up and
running with no human intervention. Or keep a hot blade waiting
to be repurposed: under software control alone, the spare
can replace a failing blade or help handle peak loads.
Easy
Maintenance
All critical components of a blade server can be made redundant
or hot-swappable, including cooling systems, power supplies,
Ethernet controllers and switches, mid and backplanes, hard
disk drives and service processors. Removing a server for
maintenance just means sliding the blade out of the chassis
- it's no more complex than removing a hot-swap hard disk
drive.
Advanced
blade server systems offer smart ways of achieving highly
sensitive maintenance. Some blade-server components can alert
a systems management processor of impending failure hours
or even days before failure occurs. Advanced diagnostics direct
a servicer directly to a failing part, allowing for quick,
efficient restoration. Some blade servers can even be designed
to have no single point of failure.
Modular
Scalability
Blade servers are revolutionary in that they scale not up
but out.
Adding
a new server generally involves nothing more than sliding
a new uni or multiprocessor blade into an open bay in the
chassis. The blade snaps in. Your infrastructure has expanded.
Furthermore, option modules inside the chassis allow you to
add shared features that once would have been attached externally.
Blade technology's modular design makes scalability lightning
fast.
Flexible
Availability
Blade technology is designed to help eliminate old limitations
imposed by conventional server design, in which each server
could accommodate only one type of processor.
Each
blade in a chassis is really a self-contained server, running
its own operating system and software. Sophisticated cooling
and power technologies can therefore support a mix of blades,
with varying speeds and types of processors. And this rapidly
developing technology offers real investment protection for
the future.
Technical
Ramifications
Immediate, real-life benefits make blade-server technology
an important contributor to an ongoing revolution toward on
demand computing. Along with other rapidly emerging technologies
(grid computing, autonomic computing, Web services, distributed
computing, etc.), blade servers' efficiency, flexibility,
and cost-effectiveness are helping to make computing power
reminiscent of a utility service like electrical power - all
you can use, whenever you need it.
New
degrees of complexity, diversity, and growth require extremely
sophisticated self-management, even self-optimization, across
an entire infrastructure. Blade servers, easily clustered
to increase power in smaller footprints, are designed to take
on self-managing functions essential to the grid and autonomic
computing models - especially key functions like workload
management, dynamic provisioning and virtualization.
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