How much and in what way blade computing can benefit businesses of all sizes depends as much on the core ideologies of this bunch of technologies as it does upon the skillful selection and blending of the individual blade units incorporated into every solution at both the hardware and software levels.
Being constructed from highly-specialized information processing and storage units; designed for high density plug "n" play implementations where future expansion, serviceability, versatility, scalability and flexibility are considered to be priorities blade computing offers enterprises of all sizes many benefits. A lot of which are not immediately apparent as the actual blade units are carefully secreted away in self-contained housing units known as blade enclosures.
The Blade Computing Model
Distributed centralized specialization and resource rationalization are the fundamental tenets of the blade computing model. This means that blade enclosures such as the HP C7000 depicted in Figure 1 can be deployed in geographically dispersed locations to provide an organization with a distributed specialized central processing and servicing functionality less prone to organization-wide single-point-of-failure scenarios.
Unlike the bastion host, standard rack mounted servers or even traditional clustered servers the blade computing model generally uses more specialized units dedicated to performing fewer more specialized computing functions and processes.
To this end; many blade units are shipped with various combinations of different hardware and support systems normally associated with computers and server-class devices absent. This is because those specific functionalities are provided by the blade chassis/enclosure.
Having the blade enclosure provide many of these integral functions rather than having them duplicated by each individual blade component type saves considerably in the numbers of components incorporated into the manufacturing of each blade unit. This as you can imagine provides substantial cost savings including transport charges. In other instances other specialized blade units will be dedicated to these “missing” functionalities.
In this way many systems that have been massively duplicated and hence often grossly underutilized in the more traditional server and computing models are not to be found in the same massive numbers in the blade computing scenario. This has resulted in blades that are specialized for processing, network, storage, Input / Output (I/O) and memory subsystems.
“A blade for every function” is the phrase that comes to mind. The IBM HS20 Blade server pictured in Figure 2 has provision for two compact high-performance 2.5” SCSI hard drives.
If you need more processing power then add a blade that is loaded with multiple multi-core CPUs and oh-la-la, more processing power to brag about is yours. Similarly if it's more memory for those graphics rendering intensive applications that you require, then add a memory blade. You can even get “general purpose” blades.
Task and component specialization along with purpose-driven blade design are but two of the ways that blade computing provides greater economic rationalization and more efficient use of computing resources at all levels within the blade system.
Space and Energy Savings
The idea behind this approach is that through removing many of these over-duplicated under-utilized components considerable space savings are achievable. In addition; removing the need for at least one power supply unit (PSU) per server results in a considerable reduction in the numbers of power supply units (PSU) built into or supplied with each individual server unit.
This not only saves considerable space it also reduces the overall excess thermal energy produced during normal and stress level operating conditions. The less floor space occupied by your data center, communications, networking and computing infrastructure the less cooling it requires and the less rent you have to pay.
The result of reducing the amount of excess (waste) thermal energy production during processing is that substantial savings can be delivered on cooling solution energy requirements. This also serves to deliver the “green points” or the carbon production reduction contributions that companies are now being asked for by government, environmentalists and the general public alike.
Everyone who has placed their hand at the top rear of a switched-on ATX tower PC is only too well aware of the amount of heat that the PSU generates. Factor in the fact that the PSU is the most common component of all computers to fail and you see the sense in replacing thirty or forty cheaper PSUs with two to four more robust and reliable units.
From a big picture perspective; the fewer more expensive higher performing more efficient power supply unit solution actually has a far cheaper setup cost than the former multiplicity of PSUs solution. The HP Blade Enclosure pictured in Figure 1 only uses two superior Uninterruptable PSUs and this particular system has 16 blade servers installed.
Through the wholesale removal and replacement of older technology PSUs with dedicated leads from DC units of superior performing, less failure-prone, higher quality redundant sets of PSUs blade computing can indeed deliver considerable energy and accrued downtime loss savings.
