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By William Van Winkle |
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Ask most small business owners about their servers, and the last word you’re likely to hear is “blades.” Blades are those godawful expensive things you find in data centers at universities or government labs. No, a small business is more likely to mention pedestal servers or 1U pizza boxes. That’s the traditional SMB paradigm. But a lot has changed in the last year, and now there are two new product families, one each from Intel and Supermicro. If the analyst forecasts are right, these two boxes may be the vanguard of your next big push into corporate computing. |
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There's no great secret to blades. Just imagine a rack of 1U servers and supporting gear. You’ve got the 1U servers, drive storage in each server and/or a nearby drive cage, power supplies in each server, a network switch, a KVM switch to manage each server in the rack, and so on. Blade architecture simply takes these pieces and condenses them down into a more compact format. Instead of a 1U machine that slides into a 19-inch rack, you have a “blade” with essentially the same components as the 1U machine sliding into a blade enclosure. Sun’s Blade 6000 unit, for example, packs 10 blades into a 10U form factor. “Well, that’s not so great,” you might say. “That’s still 10 servers in 10 Us of rack space.” The difference is that the LAN switch for the rack is now built into that 10U, saving space and potentially dropping the external network cabling down to a single strand of CAT 5/6. A blade system like Supermicro’s OfficeBlade (see below) stocked with 60 servers and their corresponding switches occupies only half of the space as an equivalent set of 1U machines. Similarly, because blade enclosures tend to use higher capacity, more efficient power supplies, power consumption and power cable count both drop accordingly. “Each 1U has got to have a power cord, right?” explains Raphael Wong, director of blade server and storage systems at Supermicro. “But you want a redundant power supply, so you actually need two power cords. Each 1U has one Gigabit Ethernet connecting to the switch. That means with 10 1Us, you have 10 CAT 5 cables connecting to the Gigabit switch. If you want a redundant Gigabit switch, then double the LAN cable count. How about cables for KVM switches, InfiniBand switches, and so on? With 10 1U servers, you can have over 100 cables. Now, with the blade, you get rid of all that cabling by means of the midplane in the blade chassis. The midplane PCB acts like the cable itself.” In 2001, when RLX Technologies pioneered the form factor, it looked like blades were set to be all the rage. Then came a few years where the limits of blades imposed themselves. The cramped space limited how processors and drives could be utilized. With all designs being proprietary, virtualization still off of most people’s radar, and management software costing a king’s ransom, blades were a niche solution that had to be deployed in enterprise-quantity fleets in order to be cost-effective. Fortunately, things change, and great things that used to be confined to the enterprise market eventually evolve, spread, and make their way down the market ladder. The prospects for blades today look brighter than ever. In November, iSupply forecast that blade servers will account for over 21.5% of all global server shipments in 2011. That’s up from 7.9% in 2006. The iSupply researcher behind these numbers, Peter Lin, noted that despite the benefits of high density, manageability, and power savings inherent to blades, the product group remained an enterprise play “since its entry price is high compared with stand alone or rack-optimized servers.”
We think that Lin’s assessment could well be pessimistic; at the very least, it discounts the SMB opportunity. Apparently, IDC agrees. In 2006, IDC predicted that blades would account for nearly 29% of the global server market in 2008 and reach 3.2 million units shipping by 2010-—a significant leap from the 2.4 million units anticipated by iSupply for 2011. This echoes a 2006 paper by Server Technology, Inc. claiming that blades already accounted for 7% of the server market and “expected that they will be the fastest growing server form factor through 2009.” Is it any wonder that market leaders HP and IBM are both not only expending more resources on developing blade product lines but also slanting part of these at an SMB audience? That’s the big question, after all. Is there an SMB audience for these devices? We queried a few local businesses just to get a sense of the market. DiversiForm, a forms distributor in Portland, OR, currently has 60 employees and just picked up its sixth physical server. Three of these servers are dedicated to Oracle work. HSW Enterprises is a construction company in Seattle with 475 employees and 70 servers, nearly all of which run on tier-one hardware. Interestingly, of these 70 servers, about 25 run at the Seattle headquarters office. Yet for these 25 servers, there are only 16 physical machines; the servers are virtual systems. We couldn’t unearth any hard national data on this point, but our informal calling around shows that an employee:server ratio of 10:1 is not uncommon. Virtualization can be a serious money saver in many situations, which is why you should be up to speed on the offerings from VMware, Microsoft, and others. “There are some really cool things you can do with solutions like VMware,” says Jared Leavitt, product line manager for Intel modular servers. “If you virtualize the compute, the way that you run like VEmotion, where you can fail over between hardware, you need a SAN to do that, right? Well, an SMB isn’t going to buy a SAN. But now they can do failover. If you’re running a Web server and you’re worried about the server going down over the weekend, you can set it up so it fails over to the other server automatically.”
Nevertheless, virtualization is far from a universal solution. HSW Enterprises found, for example, that its Citrix systems took an intolerably heavy performance hit when virtualized, so those servers run on native hardware. The bottom line is that SMBs require plenty of physical servers, and the need for such systems only seems to be increasing. A business that needs several servers or more is ripe to enjoy the benefits of blade technology provided that the form factor makes sense from the standpoints of economics and manageability. On both of these points with blades, SMBs have historically been left in the cold. “Everybody designs for the enterprise, because that’s where you get the big sales,” says Leavitt. “They take enterprise products and push them down to everyone else. But an enterprise will have 15 IT guys—-a storage specialist, a network specialist, and so on. In a small or medium business, you’ve got one or two IT guys, a few at most. They’re not specialists. They’re an inch deep and a mile wide because they’ve gotta do everything. So the key feedback we got was that these guys wanted stuff that’s easier to use.”
Is the blade market finally ready for SMBs to come in from the cold and start enjoying the server ROI benefits typical of enterprises? Let’s check out our two contenders, and you can decide. SUPERMICRO’S OFFICEBLADE We mentioned Sun’s Blade 6000 series fitting 10 blades in a 10U enclosure. Other aspirants in the SMB blade space include IBM’s BladeCenter S (six blades and 12 3.5” drives in a 7U) and HP’s BladeCenter c3000, aka Shorty (eight blades and 16 2.5” drives in a 6U). Without question, there’s a time and place to sell big brand gear, especially when you’re talking about servers. Many customers want that brand reassurance, and with five- or six-figure invoices on the line, are you going to tell them no? The big names have their own issues, of course, flexibility and cost being list-toppers. For instance, IBM’s system includes solid state hard drives, which may be a nifty idea when high-transaction access time is critical, but for everyone else it would be patently overkill. Again, this is a good example of enterprise tradition falling out of touch with an SMB target audience. If blades are really going to succeed with clients sporting 500 or fewer seats, more attention has to be paid to core functionality out of the box and higher levels of upgradeability. It’s OK to look like enterprise equipment and in many ways act like enterprise equipment, but the fine details need to show awareness of specific SMB needs. With Supermicro’s OfficeBlade, you see exactly that. The OfficeBlade is a slightly modified version of Supermicro’s SuperBlade aimed at SMBs. The OfficeBlade emphasizes dual-processor motherboards, reducing the total core count. (However, quad-processor Opteron blades are available.) This combined with other factors, such as low-noise power supplies and exclusive use of up to eight DDR2 modules rather than FB-DIMMs, allows Supermicro to have the OfficeBlade output only 50 dB when fully loaded with 10 blades and six 2.5” drives in each node. In contrast, the BladeCenter S outputs 64 dB and the HP c3000 67 dB. Who cares? SMBs, naturally. Many small businesses don’t have environmentally controlled server rooms. These blade boxes have to coexist on racks, tables, or in nearby closets with people trying to work and concentrate. Systems that produce low noise without taking a performance hit become a much higher priority.
Similarly, all experienced techs have opened aged systems and been greeted with a face full of dust. Dust and dirt accumulation is inevitable, but businesses can’t afford the extra risk in heat and clogged components such accumulation poses. This is why Supermicro integrates an air filtration system in its enclosure and HP doesn’t. Enterprise server rooms tend to be cleaner; small businesses may be operating out of a garage. Because all of the power supply requirements of the blade nodes are concentrated into fewer actual PSUs, you can imagine how important power supply efficiency is. Supermicro states that the 93% efficiency of its hot-swappable units is the best in the world. The company’s Raphael Wong paints a picture of why this is so important. If a business’s budget and infrastructure dictates a limit of, say, 10kW per rack, and a typical 1U server running Intel Harpertown (45nm quad-core Xeons) chips chews through 500W, that forces a limit of 20 servers per rack. (Actually, if that’s 500W typical rather than peak, the prudent maximum server count would be less.) With the OfficeBlade, a fully loaded box running similarly configured blades backed by Supermicro’s 93% efficiency PSUs might only consume 4,000W per enclosure. Two loaded enclosures yields 20 servers at only 8,000W-—a 20% power savings over the standard stack of 1Us. The business can then either add five more server blades in another enclosure to meet the rack’s power budget or simply pocket the cash savings each month from the lower power bills. Figuring 75% efficiency for an average 1U server with an input power of 667W and a 15 cents per kilowatt-hour energy cost (the representative price in California), each Supermicro blade server would save $473 in electricity expenses over the course of three years, or $4,730 for a filled enclosure.
“For us, green computing means two things,” says Dr. Tau Leng, director of marketing and system validation at Supermicro. “One, there’s the high-efficiency power supply. In the past, 75% or 80% efficiency was seen as OK. But now, for Supermicro’s standards, it must be 85% or more. It’s not just about saving energy but also saving money for customers. The other aspect is efficient cooling. With an efficient design, you don’t need a lot of power to cool the system. That’s why we’ve grown our expertise in power supplies and cooling, not just motherboards.” Out of the box, Supermicro includes two 1400W hot-swappable power supplies, one primary and one redundant, able to accept 100V to 240V AC. Nearly all blade systems today run on 208V power. Supermicro’s voltage flexibility comes in handy if and when a small business decides it needs to step up from standard 110V wiring into a heavier duty 208V line. Alternatively, Supermicro’s support for 110V could sway some small businesses that want to start with blades but are leery of hefty, up-front rewiring bills. When the upgrade eventually happens, the owner won’t have to pay to swap out power supply modules. As more blades are added, the user can update to a total of four PSU modules (three active, one redundant).
Having storage capacity of six 2.5” SATA disks per blade is noteworthy. That’s up to 60 drives, or 15TB figuring today’s latest 250GB capacities, per enclosure—-up to 90TB per 42U rack. Looked at differently, that’s 1.5TB of storage per server before any sort of additional virtualization of the storage is applied. For many server apps, such as imaging or Web servers, 1.5TB is more than enough, and you can always figure additional storage through a rack-based JBOD or RBOD. (An RBOD is a Bunch of Disks with RAID processing done inside the storage enclosure.) ...more |
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