Looking to slice data-center costs? Use a blade. That's the simple answer coming from some server vendors.
A key goal among companies attempting server consolidation is lower TCO through reduced facilities, hardware, software and staff outlays, according to 81 percent of attendees at a Gartner data-center conference. Not coincidentally, blade-server vendors tout their products' abilities to impact TCO favorably in all these areas. So we decided to get a handle on how these devices stack up.
Because the blade-server market is still emerging, we weren't sure what type of devices would show up in response to our invitation--each vendor we contacted has its own take on what makes a blade server. Of course, we found some common threads, including less cabling in the rack, higher density of servers per rack and better management compared with that of standalone servers (for more on blades and other server-consolidation strategies see "Why Less Is More,"). For our tests, we defined a blade server as a single chassis holding multiple servers in a blade form.
We asked Cubix Corp., Dell Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, NEC Corp., RLX Technologies and Sun Microsystems to participate. Dell and RLX sent one entry each, while HP shipped us four devices. Sun and Cubix declined to participate, both saying their products would not be ready by our test date. And despite initial interest, IBM did not submit its product for testing. NEC sent us its Express5800/ft, which didn't fit our definition of a blade for this review, but is a nice little box (see "Sweet Box, Big Price").
As we put the blade servers through their paces at our University of Wisconsin-Madison, Real-World Labs®, the question foremost in our minds was: "Is working with blades easier than dealing with a stack of 1U or 2U servers?" The answer is an unqualified "Yes." Just the drastic reduction of cables was a clear win; instead of a set of power, network and KVM cables for each server, there's just one set per blade chassis.
We also found that managing blades is simple, even compared with managing standalone servers. For example, HP's management software can be set for "rip-and-replace" mode. That is, when we removed a blade server from the chassis and placed similar hardware into the slot, the management software detected the new device and sent an image to the blade automatically. Try that with a standalone server.
Everyone's a Winner
We really took a shine to HP's BL20p G2 (Generation 2), which packs in the features and performance that one would expect in an enterprise-class server. And it includes HP's management software, which is more mature than the software from Dell and RLX. However, we did not select an Editor's Choice. Because each vendor is targeting a slightly different market segment, the devices we tested did not lend themselves to an apples-to-apples comparison. For example, some blades only had 100-Mbps network cards, while others had gigabit NICs. Also, the processors installed in the blades varied from a low-power mobile processor to a high-end P4 Xeon. Devices are listed alphabetically by vendor.
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