Blade Servers II

• Blades At the sharp end
• The leasing question
• The next wave of blades
• Will virtualisation hurt hardware sales?

How to make a case

HP business manager at Avnet, Adrian Chu, said the return on investment (ROI) in terms of power and cooling was now so significant that organisations couldn't ignore it. There are a number of tools available to do the analysis and the distributor helps its resellers look at the ongoing cost of power consumption. About 80 per cent of its blade opportunities now include some form of virtualisation; more mature partners were driving both technologies in tandem but Avnet runs programs to promote the idea within smaller tier-two resellers. Oriel's Haywood agreed increased uptake of virtualisation had been a major driver of blades. He also pointed out vendors were now on their second and third generation of blades and had addressed some earlier concerns such as heat density.

"Customers are after solutions and when they need computing power to service a requirement they are asking us for the best way to meet that need. It's our job to educate them, explain the differences and demonstrate the benefits," he said. "There are high-end limitations on blades in terms of network throughput, and we won't put blades into those installations, but vendors will address that over time with things like 10 gigabit Ethernet. It's only when there isn't enough network bandwidth that blades aren't installed."

But although there are undoubtedly blade benefits, e-Volve's Simpson said trying to demonstrate ROI could still be a tall order because capital expenditure and soft costs often sat on different profit and loss statements - those responsible for implementing technology within an organisation had little or no interest in demonstrating soft cost savings if that didn't fall under their remit. Ethan's Flutey went one further and completely trashed ROI concepts.

"Our customers are a little cynical when it comes to return on investment or total cost of ownership stories. I don't know that anybody is really successful in pitching them because they're normally stacked in favour of the person who wrote them," he said. "We give customers the information they need to make the decision themselves."

Whether or not customers buy into financial justification arguments, MCR's Salama said virtualisation was driving the way people look at their datacentres, at how their storage works, and at how their users access applications.

"That's been a catalyst for looking at new technologies. As long as the financial justification exists, not necessarily via ROI models, people will look at it," he said. "In the last 15 months [since joining MCR] I have not spoken to one customer about virtualisation and blades where they have not brought their technical engineers to a second meeting because they want to know more and acquire new skills. That is an attraction rather than a deterrent."