Blades: Slice of Heaven Or Rusty Knife?
Like all technologies, blade servers have a place in the enterprise, but it helps to know the likely benefits for your organization, since different circumstances determine whether they'll save you space or improve availability. Blade servers are best-suited to replace minicomputers. They're cheaper, just as powerful and use less electricity. As long as your apps run on commodity OSs, blades are a strong option for this purpose.
Blade servers don't necessarily save space compared with 1U servers. Because vendors are building in redundancy, control and processing, blades often take up more space than equivalent 1U servers. On the other hand, these machines take up less space than IBM iSeries or Sun Microsystems midtier servers. Blade servers don't necessarily use more power per unit than 1Us, but you must consider the amount of power required to fuel a rack and the amount of air conditioning you'll need to cool it.
For centralized management and provisioning, blade servers fare better against 1U servers than against high-end Sun and IBM boxes, the original--and still best--provisioning and server virtualization systems. But 1U servers fight vendor lock-in. If your 1U vendor makes poor business decisions or a shoddy product, you can always stop buying its products. With a blade server, it isn't so simple. You'll have blade frames lying about that might need servicing. You can't just throw out a bad box and buy a new one if that box is the entire blade frame.
Finally, determine how to achieve the highest availability--whether by using a blade or a 1U server with third-party load-balancing products from vendors such as F5 Networks or NetScaler. Blade server pricing is becoming competitive with 1U servers for the same number of CPUs, but availability and load balancing remain the more important factors. Blades still offer more of both than 1U servers, but less than 1U servers with third-party products fronting them.
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