Crossing swords

According to Gartner, mid-size businesses with 100-1000 employees run an average of 25-45 servers. About 10 of those are typically appliances designed to perform a single or specialised set of server functions such as storage, security and Web serving. By integrating these functions into one blade system, businesses can dramatically reduce the physical server sprawl associated with typical datacentres and reduce the staff needed to manage the applications essential to day-to-day business functions.

IBM blade rival, HP, is also launching an SMB specific product which will cater specifically for sites with restricted space or that need 16 blade enclosures. HP Blade System market development manager, Raymond Maisano, said there was huge market potential for blades in the SMB arena.

"The new SMB models will help businesses who struggled with the break even point in the past," he said.

But Datacom's Rencontre remained unconvinced the SMB customer would take to blades. "You need three or four blades before it becomes cost effective, and justified, and so many SMBs won't be willing to do that," he said.

Along with SMB, vendors have been staging vertical plays. Media organisations, gaming companies, and media rendering and animation houses were prime blade markets, Maisano said.

"Ease of management and deployment are some of the main market drivers of blades. Users can manage the blades, even at remote sites, with one single console," he said.

More broadly, organisations wanting energy efficiency or to consolidate their server footprint were likely candidates for blades, Maisano said. "Blades are up to 30 per cent more efficient than rack servers. This is in part because the blade infrastructure shares power across multiple servers, which generates less heat," he said.

Maisano said 26 per cent of HP's commercial and enterprise market for rack servers had migrated to blades.

"We have an aggressive program to help customers migrate to blades, and offer ease of transitioning," he said. "We're growing at about 30 per cent. Given we launched the Blade c-Class only 12 months ago, this is really good growth."

A late starter
Sun has also stepped up to the plate, launching what it calls the "fastest blade server on the planet". Sun Microsystems systems product manager, James Eagleton, said the late launch was part of the vendor's wait-and-see approach to determine what did and didn't work.

"I'm the first to admit we're late to market but to us it's a benefit," he said. "Today, many of the blades are limited in the I/O and the memory arena, so that's one of our main differentiators.

"Most of the blade products are dinosaurs. They were designed with modern technology but with today's architecture, which is not where the market is heading."

Blades of the past were also poor at addressing different workloads in the same blade chassis, Eagleton claimed.

"They did well running the same workloads [for example 14 firewalls] but weren't so good for multiple tasks because the I/O functionality wasn't fl exible," he said.

Sun had provisioned different I/Os for different blades, Eagleton said.

"This is a real benefit to customers because now a company with different workloads can accommodate it in one chassis," he said.

Blade positioning
Eagleton said virtualisation and consolidation, along with the arrival of 64-bit, were driving the overall server market uptake and, ultimately, blades. "Most blades until now haven't catered to those trends," he said.

Eagleton suggested partners avoid looking at where blades have been positioned historically. "In the past, they were niche-oriented, but now they can have a wider deployment," he said. "The virtualization and consolidation trend is driving uptake."

Datacom's Rencontre agreed virtualisation adds to the blade proposition, but doesn't drive the market. What was more exciting, he said, was being able to deploy redundant enclosures and combining this with virtual infrastructure servers.

"Organisations are beginning to reap the benefits of moving resources transparently across the datacenter between blade enclosures and between blade and non-blade infrastructure," he said. Fujitsu strategic products manager, Julian Badell, also wants to crank up the heat and get the message out about its blade line-up.

The vendor is banking on its connectivity options like the inclusion of 60 connectors in the chassis, and its compatibility with virtualisation, to win over customers. "In Australia, blade servers are a bit of a secret for us. In Europe it's not a secret as we overtook Dell in the number of units," Badell said. "The local market is dominated by two key players, but there's room for more competition."

He was confident numbers would pick up given the growing market popularity.

"The blade server market is our strongest area," Badell said.

His advice to partners was to approach two main customer groups: those considering a rack server refresh and looking at blade infrastructure for the new platform; and customers that have maxed out the datacenter because of power and space.

He also agreed blades could win the server war with the message of easier manageability and energy savings.