Did Blade Server Suitable For Your Company?

Blade technology is one of the most interesting in the server world. The leaves are often discussed by the media, blogs and IT companies, but not always easy to distinguish when it makes sense or not to blade servers in a data center. There are two important messages, the technique of sheet:

1. Blade are not for everyone
and
2. Blades offer many advantages when performed in the correct position.

In this article I choose the first item

Blade are not for everyone

The leaves have great benefits, but not perfect, but designed for all workloads and situations. A server blade server designed extremely compact, to allow a high level of performance and simplicity with efficient energy consumption. With these services, but also some limitations:

limited expansion capacity (less than equivalent PCI slots and hard drives)

Now tie the purchase of components from one source (only servers, KVM switches, Ethernet switches, fiber switches and other components used in the BladeCenter chassis to its retailers.

The expansion in the leaves tend to unite, the slots can only be "daughter cards" are filled with proprietary specifications. This means that the network cards, Fibre Channel controller SAS / RAID / SCSI card and remote access must be purchased from the manufacturer of the sheet.

Although energy consumption is a sheet smaller than that of a normal server allows the small size of more servers in a rack of test spot increased electricity consumption in the rack - which means you have the best of their compact infrastructure blades to invest heavily in refrigeration and electrical infrastructure. In addition to obtaining the maximum benefit for lower power consumption, the chassis must be fitted with the blade in its entirety.

The limited hard disk capacity in the leaves causes them to require facilities SAN Art (which has great advantages - but they are expensive). In addition, some manufacturers recommend a "boot from SAN" Put on all servers within the chassis to prevent the hard drives on each page - is interesting, though this may sound relatively expensive.