Blade servers cut the enterprise mustard

Speed, cooling and other improvements from vendors such as IBM and Egenera are helping blade servers evolve to serve a broader range of applications, but the architecture still is not suitable for certain application types, according to newly published research.

Gartner believes that the recent announcement from IBM detailing its BladeCenter H enclosure for blade servers, together with Egenera's unveiling of its BladeFrame EX, are important steps in the evolution of the server architecture.

"With these recent announcements from IBM and Egenera, blade server technology is poised to take another step forward," reported a research note by Gartner analysts Jane Wright and John Enck.

"The new models feature faster fabrics that will support future I/O technologies such as 4X InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

"The vendors also announced some important improvements in other areas of their blade product lines. IBM added more I/O channels and models based on low-voltage Xeon processors, and Egenera announced a new cooling unit called the CoolFrame."

Until now, Gartner has recommended enterprises to deploy blade servers only for a limited set of applications, including front-end, distributed applications (such as web, terminal, file and print serving) and parallel applications in high-performance computing clusters.

However, the analyst firm expects that these newer blade servers, with faster communications, lower-voltage processors and improved cooling, will be a good fit for even more applications.

"The communications enhancements in particular should enable more traffic to flow at a higher speed between blade servers and their storage devices and networks," Gartner stated.

"This will make the blade format more suitable for small or midsize database-serving, data warehousing, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications."

However, Gartner added that blade servers will not be the best fit for high-end or complex server applications.

The analyst urges enterprises to recognise that ongoing advancements, such as 4X InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet support, are expanding the range of applications which are potentially suitable for blade server deployments.

But companies should extensively test designs before deploying the new models for business critical production applications.

This testing should assess the suitability of the blade format for the target applications, while providing time for the vendors to recognise and resolve potential problems.

Because blade technology is still evolving rapidly, Gartner suggests that firms seek a two- to three-year return on investment from blade server purchases.