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back to article Blade servers are hot!

Whitepapers Against a backdrop of awful server revenues and shipments, Blade server sales continue to grow, accounting for 20 per cent of server shipments today, according to the industry body Blade.org. The blade server is the 'pile 'em high , sell 'em cheap' box du jour for all those penguin-killing data centres popping up …

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  1. Nate Amsden

    more ram

    I think it's all about more ram and virtualization. That is the early blades often had two or four DIMM slots making expansion fairly costly. Now most have at least 8 putting them on par with most previous generation 1U servers. Also with virtualization there's of course the move to more centralized storage on SAN or NAS so lack of local I/O isn't as much of an issue anymore. Most modern 1U systems now have 12-16 DIMM slots, HP and I think Sun both have half height blades that have 16 DIMMs too keeping them up to speed with their 1U counterparts. Not sure about IBM, Dell did not have more than 8 last I checked.

    For me at least in the early days the memory slots was the killer for the blades, not enough so wasn't worth using them. Power usage was quite a bit less important(even now) on small scales at least(1-2 chassis).

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  2. Hermes Conran
    Flame

    DC backbone?

    Why are these things still running their own power converters? I can't understand why the likes of Rackspace haven't made more of a commercial impact.

    Flames cuz it's hot, hot, hot!

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  3. toughluck

    Sun

    Sun offers up to 32 DIMM slots on their blades (4-socket Opteron X6440 and 2-socket T2+ T6320). With Nehalem, it's either 18 or 24 DIMM slots (4-socket X6275).

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  4. ElReg!comments!Pierre
    Coat

    Penguin _relocation_

    "for all those penguin-killing data centres popping up across the planet."

    I think you'll find it's just a relocation matter: from the cold inhospitable ice deserts to the insides of comfy penguin-powered boxen with shiny lights... well of course there's this slightly stingy "grind'em to powder" step, but Apple does the same for their pixie-powered machines and no-one objects. MS is safe on the ethics front (since you were going to ask) as no-one likes maggots to begin with.

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  5. Captain TickTock
    Troll

    DC backbone?

    "Why are these things still running their own power converters?"

    Redundancy and resilience, my dear boy. A single power converter would be a single point of failure, much like putting lots of servers in one box.

    Oh, wait a minute...

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    blade.org is not an industry body

    It's IBM's own blade ecostructure.

    You'll note that HP and Dell are not members.

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  7. David Halko
    Dead Vulture

    Redundant Power Supplies on the Sun blades...

    Hermes Conran, "Why are these things still running their own power converters?"

    Captain TickTock ,"Redundancy and resilience, my dear boy. A single power converter would be a single point of failure, much like putting lots of servers in one box. Oh, wait a minute..."

    The Sun platforms offers redundant power supplies with their racks... but El Reg decided to ignore Sun blades, again, in their articles.

    http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/6000chassis/gallery/index.xml?t=1&p=1&s=1

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  8. Adam 61

    RE: David Halko

    David,

    I suspect this is because SUN has very limited market share compared with HP, IBM and Dell in the Blade segment.

    Check out Gartners assessment and latest magic quadrant if you don't believe me! They class them as a Niche player due to their current limited market penetration compared to the Big 3.

    PS there are other Blade vendors as well if you want to take up their case i.e. Fujitsu, Hitachi, Verari, Liquid and others

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