Blade Server Technology

BLADE SERVER TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW

   Blade servers were developed in response to a critical and growing need in the datacenter: the requirement to increase server performance and availability without dramatically increasing the size, cost and management complexity of an ever growing data center. To keep up with user demand and because of the space and power demands of traditional tower and rackmount servers, data centers are being forced to expand their physical plant at an alarming rate.

Enter blade servers. They consolidate power and system level functions into a single, integrated chassis and enable the addition of servers and other components such as communications and peripheral connections via easy to install blades. Blade server technology greatly increases server density, lowers power and cooling costs, eases server expansion and simplifies datacenter management.

Blade servers are not just a new way to package traditional computing components. Rather, they are integrated systems designed to deliver server performance in efficient, high density, easy to expand, and easy to manage units. 

Blade Server Benefits

• Reduced Space Requirements - Greater density provides up to 35 to 45 percent improvement compared to tower or rackmounted servers.
• Reduced Power Consumption and Improved Power Management - consolidating power supplies into the blade chassis reduces the number of separate power supplies needed and reduces the power requirements per server.
• Lower Management Cost - server consolidation and resource centralization simplifies server deployment, management and administration and improves management and control.
• Simplified Cabling - rack mount servers, while helping consolidate servers into a centralized location, create wiring proliferation. Blade servers simplify cabling requirements and reduce wiring by up to 70 percent. Power cabling, operator wiring (keyboard, mouse, etc.) and communications cabling (Ethernet, SAN connections, cluster connection) are greatly reduced.
• Future Proofing Through Modularity - as new processor, communications, storage and interconnect technology becomes available, it can be implemented in blades that install into existing equipment, upgrading server operation at a minimum cost and with no disruption of basic server functionality.
• Easier Physical Deployment - once a blade server chassis has been installed, adding additional servers is merely a matter of sliding in additional blades into the chassis. Software management tools simplify the management and reporting functions for blade servers. Redundant power modules and consolidated communication bays simplify integration into datacenters and increase reliability.

Key Blade Server Technologies

 

Hardware:

• Servers Blades - high density computing engines with 1 to 4 processors and memory
• Blade Chassis - enclosures with integrated power and racks for housing server blades, communication blades and connections to external peripherals and inter-chassis links
• Communication Blades - integrated blades with Ethernet, InfiniBand and proprietary communication adapters and switches
• Power and Cooling Systems - centralized power distribution components that power the blade chassis and components
• Storage Subsystems - hard disk and tape storage subsystems can be inside the blade chassis or external to the chassis. Blade servers can be disk-less since they can boot from external storage in a Storage Area Network or SAN. This configuration can increase reliability and reduce space requirements by partitioning storage resources in one centralized location and computing resources in another. This also eliminates storage redundancies and simplifies storage management.

Software:

• Software Management Tools - management software that enables server administrators to deploy, control and monitor server resources.
• Virtualization Software - software that enables maximum usages of server resources by creating virtual server resources that tap physical resources as needed by the application usage

Summary

  Blade servers are efficient solutions for data centers requiring flexible, high-density deployment and management of high performance servers. Blade servers can pack more server performance into less space while reducing cost and complexity, simplifying deployment and management, and improving overall data center performance.