Blade Servers
Blade Servers
I would say that the name ‘Modern Computers’ are now referred to as ‘Blade Servers’. The Blade Servers have been around only for a few years but they have created a Hallmark history. It’s simply said.. a single board computer developed to meet the futuristic needs of Data Center modernization. It is designed to meet the requirements of high performance computing in small, mid size and enterprise business.
A blade server is just a single electronic circuit board housed with components such as CPU, RAM memory and Network connections that are normally seen on traditional computers. They are designed to slide into a chassis structure to share the common bus system, bandwidth, power and other resources. This combined hardware system form a Blade Frame. Each blade has its own software and operating system installed on it. Blades such as storage blades with hard disk drives or anomalous ones sharing SAN storage are commonly found ones in the blade server system.
Since the Data Centers are now forced to expand their facilities like space, power, hardware and network communications to meet the growing needs. The Blade Server technology greatly helps in lowering the power costs, cooling costs, eases server management and expansion.
Blade Servers Vs Rackmount
The Demands for Blade Servers are growing at a very faster rate when compared to the traditional rack servers at the Data Centers. The simple but strong reason behind is that Blades are easy to manage and also takes very less space , power and cooling resources.
Traditional Servers has its own power, fan and network cables and they also require more space for housing. More difficult in deployment, management and expansion. But Blade Servers share the resources like power, network and storage etc among themselves through common system. It takes less space and since network / storage are available inside the frame, it helps in preventing cable congestion and also less foot steps to the servers for management. Blade Servers deployed at enterprise level are proven to be cost effective since expansion / space and power usage with the rack servers eating up more.
Blade Server Advantages
Everywhere and here we started to discuss strong about ‘Green Computing’, Datacenter virtualization, Power Consumption, Disaster Recovery and High availability. These are the growing and future needs in computing business.
The Datacenters are now trying to completely change themselves into a Green Datacenter. A Datacenter which are designed to run in an economical way by outputting maximum efficiency with the available resources are called as Green Data Centers.
Green Datacenters actually concentrate on investing in technologies that require less amount of power like converting their input sources to Solar energy savers. Converting their high power emitting rack / traditional mounted servers into Cool Frames also helps a major part in Green Computing. Helping hand technologies like Virtualization, Cloud computing, Hyper visors, Remote server / application management play a major role in deployment of Blade Servers.
Blade Servers with Virtualization
Blade Servers and Virtualization have become hot topics in IT environments. They are engaged to each other to provide a consolidated system. For example taking a large number of underutilized servers, let us consolidate them using server virtualization – so now lets run 10 virtual servers on one physical server. we can implement those on blades, which gives us very high density for the physical servers that we do have, plus the sharing of all of the components that blade servers offer. We are now providing the same, or more power to run the business applications, in less space, with less power, less cooling, sharing resources, providing high availability, and a flexible infrastructure.
These virtual servers can be easily managed by the management tools provided by the blade server product companies.
IBM, HP, Egenera and other blade production companies producing Blade Center / Frames are actually packed with up to multiples blade servers. Adding virtualized softwares like VMware / Microsoft virtual server / Xen etc.. allows System administrators to run multiple applications on a single server. Along with the management tools provided by these Blade Vendors helps in managing the blade / storage / network resources through single point. IT managers feel that data / server management are made simple and easy through these virtualized tools. This also has proven record of reducing costs in server management / hardware maintenance.
Blade Servers – Major Players
The major players in the blade market are HP, IBM, SUN, Egenera, Supermicro, Hitachi, Fujitsu-Siemens, Rackable, Verari Systems, Dell and Intel.
Blade Servers – Clients
Customers are from largest markets like financial services, Service providers, and public and health care sectors.
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