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Make blade servers as homogeneous as possible

Blade computing works best when organizations apply a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy, meaning all the blades in the chassis are as similar as possible and ideally, identical. This means same cpu, same speed, same memory, same everything, including the same vendor. By standardizing on blade servers, operating procedures can assume that every component in the chassis is identical and IT operations doesn’t have to worry about the sensitivity of a particular server component to an application’s unique characteristics. This makes blades more swappable, easier to manage, simpler to back up and cheaper to acquire and inventory. Greater diversity within the chassis defeats many of the benefits of blade computing.

If for whatever reason, you don’t want to enforce this degree of commonality, it is advisable that customers take an N and N-1 approach to blade server technology, meaning standardize on a couple of blade server types, one current technology and one current minus one generation, replacing existing server technologies every few years to keep the infrastructure simple. The business benefits of commonality, as seen in the case examples will outweigh any incremental hardware costs borne by this approach.

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Featured Case Study

Financial giant goes green

The corporate IT group of a very large, worldwide financial organization with 100,000 employees, has initiated an ongoing “greening” process. This is focused largely on reducing energy use both to decrease the corporation's carbon footprint while creating a net savings in operational costs over the lifetime of new, more energy-efficient equipment, including new storage systems. This effort is not viewed by the IT administration as a one-time project but rather as a perpetual process of evaluating new technology in part on its energy efficiency and introducing it into the corporate data centers to replace aging systems as appropriate.

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Featured How-To Note

Planning a Green Storage Initiative

Fluctuating energy prices have heightened electricity and energy consumption as a major issue within the technology community. IT is a significant consumer of energy and IT energy costs have been rising disproportionately because of continued investment in denser IT equipment. Estimates from the EPA and others indicate that IT will account for 3% of energy consumption by 2012. While technology changes have decreased footprint, power loading (amount of power required for a square foot of data center space) and heat load (the amount of heat that has to be removed from a square foot of data center space) have both escalated dramatically. The result is higher energy costs to provide power and extract heat from the data center, and lower utilization of data center floor space because of power and cooling limitations. The technology trends are toward higher heat and power loading, which will exacerbate the problem. read more...