Blade or brick, take your pick: both increase server power, not server numbers

Computer Technology Review,  July, 2002  by Christine Taylor Chudnow

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Many organizations want to increase their server power without increasing or replacing their servers, especially at busy network edges serving firewalls and domain names. The industry has responded by developing server blades and bricks, which are modular servers with smaller form factors for dense processing power. Bricks are computing blocks made up of memory, processors, or storage operating systems. These blocks can be assembled inside chassis to form larger and more-complex computers. (Dell remarked that its bricks' similarity to Lego designs is no accident.) Blades consist of cards with server functionality, which are inserted in a rack to share power supplies and network connectivity. Manufactured by companies like RLX Technologies, server blades exist in edge, department, and workgroup deployments where they offer cheap, high-density processing at moderate performance speeds. These high-density server environments have implications for data storage, especially with high-density, high-performance blade s and bricks scheduled to ship in 2002 and 2003.

Steve Berens, director of marketing at Benchmark, said that r blade environments definitely impact the way storage is handled: "A very dense server configuration requires a very concentrated storage configuration." Storage products that support blade deployments include both disk- and tape-based backup, including Dot Hill's RAID Blade and Benchmark's ValuSmart Tape 640 Blade. These are storage units with small form factors that can receive incoming data in parallel, a necessary quality in a dense server environment. Berens sees economic factors as important in blade storage configurations. He said, "For the next couple of years at least, budgets will not be as free flowing as they were. In this environment, people are looking to take maximum advantage of the dollars they have today. As long as we can deliver a scaling incentive to storage, that's where they see the big advantage. If you make these devices like a network printer where it's simple to attach it to the network interface and it works, that's the model we're using."

Dot Hill's Omar Barraza, director of product management, said that blade servers do present specialized storage issues because of their high density. Dot Hill released its RAID Blade a year ago to serve 1U and 2U server environments. Barraza said, "Dot Hill is taking blade servers under consideration. That's one of the reasons we developed Axis storage manager. However, I think customers are going to wait until the performance of blade servers approximates the performance of traditional servers." Anticipating that Axis would need to manage blade servers, Dot Hill kept it to a 1U form factor.

Blade Servers in the Data Center

Several major vendors--including IBM, Sun, and Dell--have recently announced that they're developing blade or brick servers for highend data centers. These servers maintain high density and are highly configurable, but also offer high performance, availability, and manageability. Storage will become even more. important in these high-end-blade-server environments as blades infiltrate data-intensive glass houses.

Though all of these blade manufacturers mention storage components, Dot Hill's Barraza wonders how well blades will scale to high performance environments, and how that will impact storage. There is no internal storage for existing blade products--the compact cards contain no disk, and, although bricks would include modular disk storage, they are not out of the R&D stage. But as performance grows, blades will scale up from network servers to application servers. This will require some sort of storage networking.

Blades can reach up to 300 cards in a standard rack, leading to very dense data movement requiring scalable and flexible storage. Customers that have deployed this type of server configuration will likely want the same flexibility in their RAID arrays and tape autoloaders, where they can economically and simply increase storage capacity in a rack-mounted configuration. For example, backing up to multiple tape drives enables more efficient parallel backups, while installing multiple devices like lower-cost RAID drives grants redundancy.

IBM plans to introduce high-performance server blades for data center, clustering, and grid environments. BladeCenter will focus on running full-fledged applications on a blade platform, using its Director Tool to manage the multiple processors. It will integrate servers, storage, and networking. Jeff Benck, director of xSeries eServer said, "Many people talk about blades being a smaller server factor. We have a different vision."

Benck believes that many customers adopting blades want to accomplish server consolidation by harnessing centralized blade management, but they don't want to give up performance for density. IBM plans to leverage its own storage division with a comprehensive set of integrated blade storage products that will support local storage in blade environments.