Server Squeeze

Although blade technology has existed for several years, 2003 marks the first time that full-fledged blade products are available from the three major Intel server makers: Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Those vendors?along with Sun Microsystems and its Intel- and UltraSparc-based blades, and lesser-known RLX Technologies, which produces blades based on both Intel and Transmeta processors?all hope that the technology will help jump-start a moribund server market.

Blades’ roots reach back to the halcyon days of the dotcom boom, when space-squeezed Internet data centers began looking for compact servers they could pack together as closely as possible. "Simply put, with blade servers, they could put more servers per square foot than they could using conventional rack-mounted servers," says John Enck, an analyst who covers the blade market for Gartner.

Today, vendors are looking to expand the number of potential customers by marketing blades to just about any enterprise that needs to operate multiple servers. Most observers, however, believe that the technology is still best suited for organizations with server-intensive IT shops, such as Internet server providers, online merchants, financial institutions, research labs and media streamers.

For vendors, blades provide a unique opportunity to lock customers into a long-term relationship. Just as shaver-makers design razors to accept only one type of blade?their own?blade-server vendors aim to enmesh customers inside a highly proprietary environment. "There’s no ability to interchange anything between products," notes Enck.

Getting enterprises to commit to a particular type of blade technology is crucial to vendors at this early stage, since the market is projected to skyrocket over the next few years. Imex Research predicts global sales will soar from $50 million in 2002 to $3.5 billion in 2005, according to Anil Vasudeva, president of the San Jose, Calif.-based IT research company.

Vendors realize that blade sales made today will continue to pay off for many years. They understand that in addition to hooking organizations to their technology, the large enterprises will drag smaller organizations along in their wake. "Typically, large enterprises tend to lead the way, and what they do impacts the market further down the line," says Charles King, infrastructure hardware research director for The Sageza Group, a computer industry research company in Mountain View, Calif.

A Hot Technology

Los Alamos ventured into blade technology during the summer of 2001, when it began replacing a 128-processor parallel cluster supercomputer that was failing on an almost weekly basis. Part of the problem was the laboratory’s less-than-ideal physical plant. "Our entire cluster environment sits in a dusty, hot?80 degrees Fahrenheit to 85 degrees Fahrenheit?and confined work area inside a warehouse," says Feng. By consuming less power, blades generate less heat and are therefore less likely to fail, particularly when operating in such a subpar environment.