Virtualization Popularizes Blade Server Technology Where to Go

Although blade servers have been the constant data center 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.

One factor contributing to the demise of blade servers is the rapid adoption of server virtualization, although most modern blade servers have the ability to host virtual machines (VMs), but some simple economic, hardware, and networking factors make blades Servers are not attractive to today's virtualized data centers.

Blade Server Technology Economics

For many organizations, the economic situation 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.

Blade Server VM Limitations

Another factor affecting the use of blade servers in virtual data centers is the lack of sufficient hardware to host a large number of VMs, although blade servers have certain scalability capabilities, such as Dell. The PowerEdge M910 is a four-socket server that can hold up to eight cores of processor and can scale up to 512GB. You can figure out how many virtual servers the PowerEdge M910 can support.

The problem is that even if there are blades with high computing power, users can't use them because the blade server doesn't have a unified standard. When the 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 manufacturers to bundle bundles and blades. If users want to mix blades from different manufacturers, they must purchase 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 Limitations

Another factor affecting enterprise adoption of blade server technology for server virtualization is the lack of network interfaces. Most blade servers offer only a limited number of integrated network cards and one Set of sandwich 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 depending on the 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 cause blade servers to decline 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.

Author: Brien M. Posey Translator: Huang Yongbing