What prompted the blade server to die?

Although blade servers have been a constant data center device for many years, the situation has changed subtly, and some strange factors have forced many companies to replace blade servers with rack servers. In fact, these factors may indicate that the design philosophy of the entire data center is changing.

prompt blade servers to the demise of a factor is the rapid adoption of server virtualization

While most modern blade servers have the ability to host virtual machines (VM), but some simple Economic, hardware, and networking factors make blade servers unattractive for today's virtualized data centers.

Blade Economics

For many organizations, the economy has driven them to adopt server virtualization technology. In reality, server hardware resources are often underutilized. Virtualization can save the organization more cost (and extend the life cycle of hardware investment) by better and more fully utilizing existing hardware.

When implementing server virtualization, many companies want to reduce server hardware costs. From a cost perspective, if the physical server cost of accommodating 10 VMs is equivalent to the cost of the past 10 physical servers, such a server Virtualization is meaningless. At first, companies using blade servers thought this was not a problem. After all, blade servers still have a good reputation for cost savings. The problem is that blade servers cannot be self-sufficient like rack servers or tower servers.

The blade server is small because it does not include a power supply or a fan. These components (and other components) are often integrated into an expensive chassis that is the backplane of the blade server, providing power, cooling, and Network ports and other interconnect components.

When determining the overall cost of blade server technology deployment, organizations must consider the cost of the chassis (and any additional modules required), for example, if only a small number of servers are needed, the cost of the blades will be higher than the rack server To be high, the cost of the chassis and the additional modules required is an important factor in increasing the cost of the blade server. On the other hand, if you fill the chassis with a blade server, the cost of the blade will drop because the cost of the chassis is spread across all blade servers.

In short, if a company wants to save money by reducing the amount of server purchases, blade servers may not be the best choice.

VM Restrictions

Another factor affecting the use of blade servers in virtual data centers is the lack of sufficient hardware to host large numbers of VMs, although blade servers have some extensions. Capabilities, such as the Dell PowerEdge M910 is a four-socket server that can hold up to eight cores of processors, and the memory can be expanded to 512GB. You can figure out how many virtual servers the PowerEdge M910 can support.

The problem is that even with high-capacity blades, users can't use them because the blade server doesn't have a uniform standard. When a user buys a blade chassis, they can only buy the same manufacturer later. Blade servers, in addition, even with the same manufacturer's blade chassis, there are limits to support different types of blade servers, such as Dell's M1000e chassis can only be inserted into the Dell M series blade server.

Lack of standards is a key factor hindering enterprises from hosting virtual servers on blades. It is common for vendors to bundle bundles and blades. If users want to mix blades from different vendors, they will have to buy blades from different vendors. Chassis.

In addition, users will find that the chassis they purchase will soon become obsolete, and manufacturers will stop producing slightly older blades in order to promote new products, which means that if your blade chassis has extra space. However, it may not be able to buy a suitable blade server. Although the blade can bring good economic benefits, the technical risk is higher than the traditional rack or tower server.

Network Interface Restrictions

Another factor affecting enterprise adoption of blade server technology for server virtualization is the lack of network interfaces, and most blade servers offer only a limited number of Several integrated network cards and a set of mezzanine card slots. Typically, one of the card slots is occupied by a Fibre Channel card to connect the blade server to the storage network (SAN) and the other to the network card.

The number of Ethernet ports that are actually available to the blade server varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, and it is not possible to plug the network cable into the back of the blade server like other servers. Instead, each network port must be mapped to an Ethernet module that is installed into the chassis. Many different types of modules need to be installed into a space-constrained chassis. The size of the chassis limits the number of Ethernet modules that can be accommodated. A large number of enterprises hosting a large number of virtual servers on a blade server is a huge problem. If there are not enough network interfaces, the network will become a performance bottleneck.

A number of economic and technical factors have slowed the adoption of blade server technology in virtual environments and may lead to a decline in blade servers in the data center. However, blade servers are still an important computing platform for many enterprises. So they don't quickly disappear from people's horizons.