Blade Servers Begin to Catch On

With 2004 sales north of $1 billion and a 5% market share, blade servers are accelerating up the adoption-curve hockey stick. Author of this link, Timothy Prickett Morgan, asks why the adoption rate isn't even faster? The answer is IT inertia. Even the next best thing -- virtualization, dual cores, name your own favorite -- just takes lots of time to work its way into decade-long IT buying cycles. Today's rack-mounted servers replaced stand-alone Unix or tower x86 servers (e.g., the Windows NT generation). Yet the adoption cross-over from tower to rack-mount only took place three years ago, almost a decade after Compaq introduced the first Proliant rack-mount server.

At the end of this decade, the hot ticket will be four-way blades with 16 processor cores on 4 microprocessors. With then-maturing hardware and software virtualization capabilities coupled to better remote, hands-off systems management and operations, I predict each blade will be able to replace an entire rack -- and sometimes two racks -- of today's installed servers of circa 2002. That means a single, full blade cage will be able to free up literally hundreds of square feet of datacenter real estate. It will be the Storage Area Network that becomes the big real estate consumer as server floor space declines. But a parallel trend towards high-density SATA drives for enterprise applications will allow for much denser (but slower retrieval and lower duty cycle) storage in the same five-year timeframe. With this increasing density, the server capacity for a pretty good size enterprise, say 5,000 employees, would fit in a standard 42" rack. Just be careful not to kick out the power cord.

Peter S. Kastner