A Management Problem

Beyond the problem of sorting through various blade designs, early adopters face the headache of dealing with management software. "Every blade today has memory, processors and disks on it, so you have to manage all those resources on each blade," notes Enck. A blade server usually comes complete with an operating system (typically Windows or Linux) and a dedicated?and usually proprietary?management application.

The problem with those programs is that they preclude the mixing of blades from various vendors. Fortunately, at least some degree of standardization is likely to arrive within a few years. "Standards are coming, but I think it will stop at the point of being able to have complete interoperability of all the blades between all the vendors," says Enck.

IBM is hoping to smooth the path to standardization?and promote its blade strategy?by making its Director management software available for resale by other blade-server vendors. "The dream, of course, is that there will be software solutions that will allow the blending of server platforms in these squirrelly heterogeneous environments that a lot of companies have," says Sageza’s King.

But there will be limits to standardization, adds Enck. "I don’t think we will ever see a situation where we will be able to take an IBM blade and put it into a Dell enclosure," he says.

The Next Hurdle

Another major hurdle facing blade vendors is getting their products to work with advanced storage systems. "There are limits to integrating blades into SAN and other direct access storage structures," says Enck, who says some blade vendors have added SAN and other support, but only in a limited fashion thus far. Storage integration is gradually becoming a reality, however. IBM, for example, is offering optional fibre channel and gigabit Ethernet capabilities, giving its blades the flexibility to support both storage area network and network-attached storage environments. Other vendors are likely to follow IBM’s lead.

Many observers believe that as blades become more capable, it’s only a matter of time before they begin challenging standalone server sales. "At some point, businesses are going to have to start buying a technology to replace boxes that are simply getting out of date," says King. Enck concurs: "Looking out five years, I think this will be a very strong technology."