The one-box wonder isn’t going to cut it for Nigel Fortlage anymore.
A few years ago, the vice-president of Winnipeg-based customs brokerage GYI International Ltd. became an early adopter of virtualization, consolidating a number of server environments into a single IBM iSeries machine. As GYI approaches its end of lease, however, Fortlage has determined the costs are getting too high, so he’s asking his management to approve the deployment of some blade servers instead. He knows there’s some risk involved.
“Definitely the message from Gartner (at a recent event) was, if you don’t need to do blades today, then don’t,” he said. “They were saying that the investment you make may not have a future and you may be doing forklift upgrades until the standards are there. That put a scare into me.”
The fear isn’t really hurting sales, however. According to a recent IDC Canada market update, spending on the overall server market is fairly weak, with growth forecast at only 1.5 per cent. Within that, volume servers are expected to grow at three per cent. Blade servers, however, are forecast to grow at 10 per cent, according to the research firm.
“There has definitely been some impact on servers due to virtualization and getting more utilization out of infrastructure,” said IDC Canada managing director Vito Mabrucco. “Smaller servers are getting more powerful.”
As a loyal Big Blue customer, Fortlage said he’s sticking with IBM, but that his research had him speaking with several vendors, including Sun and HP, for the first time. “I’ve had some interesting conversations in the last six weeks,” he said.
Although it may take years before you can take any blade and make it work with any other blade or module, there are a few steps you can take now to make sure your deployment goes smoothly. Consider these do’s and don’ts.
Figure out what kind of blade buyer you are
IT managers should consider ease of growth in their data centre, the upgrade path for the blade servers in question and the number of components they’ll need to deal with, especially for machines with multiple power supplies. Many of the major vendors have created an array of blades for a variety of specific needs.
“If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” says Brian Down, chief technologist and principal engineer at Sun Microsystems. “Well, we have a hammer, a screwdriver and an awl.” In other words, Sun includes a multi-threaded Sparc-based blade, a Xeon-based box and a X64-based machine in its portfolio.
“If you’re a telco, you probably want to stay with one of our Netra (ACTA) product. If you’re running a high-performance computing environment, you should be looking at X64-based products. If you’re looking for throughput, we’ve got the (SunFire) T2000.”
Earlier this year, IBM added to its own lineup with the HS12, a low-cost blade that starts at only $999 and was specifically designed as more of an entry-level product.
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