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.