Will You Be The 1 In 6 Buying Blades?
There has been lots of talk around the water coolers about Blade technology
This article is for those of you who have missed all the talk because you haven’t been drinking your recommended 8 glasses a day.
The blade server market is projected to grow over 300% to $11 billion by 2010. It is expected that 1 in 6 servers sold in 2010 will be blades. Although blades aren’t suitable in all situations, if you are looking at consolidating half a dozen or more servers you would be crazy not to consider the option.
Some of the benefits of this high density option:
- Increase manageability
- Reduce points of failure
- Reduce TCO
- Drive out cable complexity
- Reduce Power requirements
- Speed of deployment
- Less costly to cool
- Increase density
- Reduce weight
- Current and future fabrics
- Increase usable space
- Virtualisation
IBM’s strength in the market can be largely attributed to its ability to update blade technology while ensuring servers are backwards compatible. This vendor specific road map protects customer investment. Customers who purchased IBM blade technology back in 2001 can add current blades to their chassis.
A situation where a company would normally write off their infrastructure after a 3 year period has now had a life of 6 years and is still going strong.
Another of IBM’s strengths in the Blade server market is the ability to have multiple operating systems and blade types all resident in the one chassis. This Includes Windows, Linux and AIX.
It is also rumoured that soon OS/400 blades will be available and maybe even zOS blade servers in the future.
A spin off advantage that some customers have noticed is the lower cost of SAN switch ports in a Blade Centre as compared with external SAN switch ports.
Give us a call for more information on how blade can work in your infrastructure:
- 1800 777 111 in Australia
- 09 307 0520 in New Zealand
We can show you blade technology in action and book time for you in one of the test labs.
