The pending arrival of grid computing should also help boost blade server sales. Many see blades as a natural fit with grid technology, given blades’ flexibility, high performance and cluster-based foundation (see "True Grid," Page 44).

Growing Pains

With blade servers now becoming entrenched in the IT mainstream, adopters and vendors are beginning to face issues that often affect maturing technologies. With blade servers, two key concerns are standardization and improved server management.

Continental’s Edwards is pessimistic that there will ever be meaningful blade server standardization, given the current cutthroat competition that exists between blade vendors. "The idea of being able to take any vendor’s product and plug it into that rack seems far-fetched to me," he says. Because of this, Edwards suggests that enterprises buy blade server technology to address a specific, immediate application. "Just like you would for a midrange system," he says. "Put it on the data center floor and plan on replacing the whole thing when it comes time to upgrade."

Blade management tools are often supplied to customers by the hardware vendors themselves. IBM, for example, bundles its Director management software free with its eServer blades. This means that many customers are drawn toward a particular blade server vendor on the basis of the company’s management tools as well as its hardware. Software quality varies widely between vendors, so it pays to shop carefully to find the right tools. "If [the vendor] gets the management right, a blade server approach can deliver a great return," says Wettemann.

As the blade server market matures, more third-party software companies are entering the field, which is helping to expand the pool of available products. ASU’s Mars team, for example, relies on job scheduling software from PBS Pro. Companies such as BladeLogic and Opsware also offer automation software to manage blades. These companies provide products that automate many configuration processes that are usually handled manually, such as the application of patches or the collection of inventory information. One advantage these companies offer is that their software can work with blade servers and traditional servers from a variety of vendors. Hewitt believes that blade management tools are destined to get better and become more widely available in the near future. "It will probably take two years to show maturity," he says.

In the meantime, for most adopters, blade servers’ shortcomings in the areas of cooling, limited software selection, hardware incompatibility and limited track records are a small price to pay for powerful server capabilities in a small package at a lower cost. As Gorelick puts it, "More CPUs are better."