By Christopher Coetzee, Intel server product manager at Rectron
As we all know, today`s data centres provide us with the means to maintain our flexible business operations. However, and this is key, they have to do this while also reducing costs through automation, more efficient operations and fewer service visits.
In this light, modular computing has stepped forward to provide a more flexible data centre driven by modular hardware, software, automation tools and hardware virtualisation.
At the heart of the modular computing paradigm lie blade servers. A blade is a single-board server that contains one to four processors, memory, local disk storage, and on-blade network interface card (NIC) and SAN connectivity.
Additionally, a blade chassis may also hold one or more Ethernet and SAN switch modules, one to four power supplies, one to two shared management modules and cooling resources. Chassis components communicate across a fully redundant midplane, enabling hot swap functionality of the chassis components and easy serviceability.
But why blade servers? The provisioning capability of our existing rack-mounted server environment is both lengthy and inflexible. Subsequently, blade servers have stepped to the fore to provide a more viable solution - reducing costs in areas such as capital expenditures, operational expenses, and physical plant requirements while improving efficiency. Indeed, blade servers allow for up-front provisioning of the chassis and switch components when adding compute blades as needed.
And for a business to stay at the top of its game, it needs flexible computing, storage and networking resources.
Traditional data centre infrastructures are based on pedestal and RMS (rack mount servers), which are added as particular loads demand more capacity. This approach has revealed two problems:
* With each additional server, it increases complexity in the typical heterogeneous environment of today`s data centres.
* It dedicates the resource to a particular computing need, which restricts the ability of resources to be quickly adapted to changing needs.
And yes, many IT departments are consolidating servers, standardising technologies and deploying clusters to rein in sprawl, and simplifying the architecture to reduce management burden and costs, while increasing resources. These approaches are helping, but do not provide a complete solution.
There are no significant barriers to introducing blade servers into our environments, only a number of critical benefits that ultimately allow for a more cost-effective, flexible infrastructure that embodies the modular computing paradigm.
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