Blade Runners

For any enterprise, servers form the key part of the digital nervous system,
for the enterprise's entire repository of knowledge resides and gets processed
in the servers. As we look into the evolution path of the server, it becomes
evident the industry has come a long way from its humble origins. In the
formative years, the 1980s, Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC) ruled. The
CISCs, though they can process large quantum of instructions, suffered from this
very strength, because that slowed down the processing power due to lots of
unwanted instructions. To plug that lacunae, the next logical evolution in
computing was the Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC) processors that
cognized only a limited set of instructions, thus hastening the speed of data
processing. While RISCs are at the higher end of the spectrum, the dawn of Intel
x86 server architectures opened up new realms in the server space. Given the
dynamics of the server market, is there a technology that can marry all the
server concepts and bring to table a product that is affordable but at the same
time very agile and scalable? The answer is blade servers.

When we contrast blade server technology against the conventional server
design, it marks a significant shift. Typically a blade is just a motherboard
with the processor, which slides into a blade rack that is attached to a back
plane. All the blades in the rack share components like fan, power and cabling.
While the initial set up cost for a blade is a bit cumbersome, the total running
costs and the ease in terms of configuring and re-configuring the blades as per
the enterprises computing demands make it a technology to reckon with. Hence
blades are suited for server farms, typically data centers or ISP servers that
routinely witness a sudden demand for processing power. During such scenarios, a
redundant blade can be easily configured to meet computing demands. Also, blades
occupy less floor space, making it ideal for various environments.

Blade servers, with their inherent advantages, have now become the fastest
growing Intel-platform for servers in the world. Since their introduction a few
years ago, their population has been increasing, keeping pace with the
development of the technology itself. Blade servers are gaining wide
acceptability in India as well. Verticals like banking and financial services,
digital content creation, and the like, have taken the blade server market out
of its telecom intensive domain, for which it was originally created. According
to research firm IDC, substantial growth in the worldwide blade server market is
expected over the next four years. Roughly 185,000 blade servers were sold in
2003 globally. By 2008, IDC expects the market to reach 9.9 mn units, valued in
excess of $3.7 bn.

Blades for All

Any customer who requires Intel Servers can go for blades. Says Anil Sethi,
GM, eServer X-series and IntelliStation, IBM India, "Rather than asking who
should use blades, the question is, who should not use blade servers. Having
said that, I would like to add that the blade servers provide the highest
performance density as compared to the normal tower servers or the rack
optimized servers available in the market. Therefore they are ideal for
processing memory hungry applications."

IBM, for instance, has installed blades across verticals in India like
manufacturing, financial services, oil and gas, digital content creation,
engineering design, and computer services industry among others. Blade servers
are increasingly making server technologies available to the growing
enterprises. This in a way is giving super computing power to ordinary
enterprises, which cannot afford conventional standalone servers. Says Sethi,
"Blade servers have emerged as a weapon of choice for fast growing
businesses and enables smaller businesses to access supercomputing strength at
prices they can afford."

In India, apart from IBM, Sun Microsystems and HP pursue the blade market
aggressively. HP, for instance, has announced a new breed of servers based on
the Intel Xeon processor based on the 64-bit technology, which was formerly
code-named Nacona. According to HP sources, the company is the first server
vendor to sell more than 100,000 blades. This makes HP a leader in the blade
space, mainly due to the broad portfolio and mix and match of technologies it
offers. For instance, the HP ProLiant blade systems, the company claims, offer
improved processing power and performance for enterprise customers who intend to
build a comprehensive infrastructure. These servers complement the industry's
most comprehensive portfolio of 64-bit offerings.

Meanwhile with blades all set to become a volumes space in the coming years,
players like HP have to fight for market share from other vendors like Sun and
IBM. Quips Anil Valluri, director, client services organization, Sun
Microsystems India, "Blades are reshaping how the Indian industry thinks
about servers. In the quest to squeeze more computing power into less floor
space, Indian companies are buying ever-thinner servers, bolted to racks in
collections that resemble six-foot-tall stacks of pizza boxes. Blades take this
concept one step further. There is a big potential market in India and at Sun we
are extremely bullish about our growth prospects in this segment."

Valluri further says, "Like any emerging market there is a lot of
excitement about blade technology. Blade servers will provide more firepower for
mail and messaging, line of business applications, media streaming, and database
applications. With their arrival, blades are slowly moving from the edge of the
network (mail, web, proxy, firewall) to the middle-tier (applications). They are
being deployed in India across the banking, manufacturing, telecom and biotech
sectors."

Advantage Enterprise

As we cut through the marketing hype surrounding the blade technology and
ponder over the key question on its deliverables to an enterprise, the immediate
reply of the vendors is the flexibility in terms of managing the computing
power. Says Sethi, "Today one of the biggest challenges before the CIO is
simplification and consolidation of the IT infrastructure, which has components
like servers, storage, applications, et al. Blades actually make this
consolidation a lot easier, as against normal physical consolidation (where you
keep the servers together), where you get to save very little on the management
resources because you are still managing all the servers. Integration is the
foundation of blade technology."

Agrees Arun Gupta, senior director, business technology, Pfizer India,
"Blade servers are maturing in technical terms and going forward should
encourage building of grids in the enterprise thereby harnessing the unused
power across multiple servers. Moreover, by compressing the form factor, one of
the big benefits of blades is in space saving over standard rack-mounted
servers. Apart from the obvious benefits, they also encourage storage separation
from servers, which improves utilization of disks."

Pfizer India is currently operating with legacy servers acquired over a
period of time. In the next phase of its consolidation and renewal, it would be
evaluating blades as an option. At the same time, the next cycle will also
coincide with the push towards 64-bit computing infrastructure. Thus
availability of 64-bit blades will be one of the key factors its adoption. Says
Gupta, "The adoption of technology in India is in step with the rest of the
world and I strongly believe that organizations that require intense computing
power will be giving blade servers a good look in their evaluation."

The maturing of blade technology is clearly a value proposition for
enterprises. For instance, with 64-bit RISC processor based blades becoming a
reality enterprises can run mission critical applications on blades. However
industry sources aver that RISC based blades would be the forte of niche
segments like BFSI and telecom companies. Says Valluri, "Indian CIOs are as
excited like their counterparts worldwide about blades. If you consider a CIO's
role today, it has evolved from just taking care of the organization's IT
needs to a business enabler. With that in perspective, the key concern that CIOs
have about blades centers around arriving at the seamless integration of a blade
environment into their existing data center architecture. Here the selection of
the right vendor and careful planning will help the CIO realize the underlying
benefits of the blade technology."

Blade server technology has matured faster than expected and the IDC's
projected market size of $3.7 bn by 2008 is a clear indicator of the foreseen
adoption of this technology in the days ahead. Moreover, the evolution of 64-bit
RISC based blades is also being seen as a turning point and the biggest and best
value proposition for enterprises. While the market for the 32-bit server
platform is still a burgeoning one, the fear of OS crashes while running mission
critical applications on a 32-bit platform is always there. Given these
limitations, enterprises centered on 32-bit technologies can now logically
migrate to 64-bit RISC blades and derive maximum RoI and TCO. All in all, for
enterprise, which does not have any major legacy systems, going in for blades
would be the next natural step.

Shrikanth G in
Chennai