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Latest Peer Incite Research:
Latest Peer Incites:
1. How Shopzilla Manages Insane Storage Growth (5:18)
- NEW Research: Pitfalls of Compressing On-line Storage.
WikitipMake blade servers as homogeneous as possibleBlade 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. |
Featured Case StudyFinancial giant goes greenThe 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. |
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Featured How-To Note |
Planning a Green Storage InitiativeFluctuating 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. |