Blade Server Infrastructure

Why You Should Transition Your Business to Blade

Blade servers are designed to lower cost to your business. The value they offer should be measured not just in terms of the price you pay upfront, but the savings they offer your business while in service.

They are not just for the large enterprise either. Of course they are scalable so help to consolidate old server farms with  multiple servers, but if you are running 4 or more servers in your business, then Blades should be a consideration.

If any of the below are issues you need to address in your business, a Blade infrastructure is definitely worth considering.

• Energy costs & consumption
• Managing your infrastructure
• Flexibility to add or re-assign compute power
• Space constraints
• Cabling
• Connectivity between network devices

Any one of these challenges is reason enough to consider Blade. A combination of these and Blade’s are a must for your business.

Blade’s are all about the bottom line. And here’s how some of these savings are realised:

Energy Consumption

More power/less efficiency = more heat = more cooling  = more power consumption

With the Government drive to reduce business’s carbon output the need for increased efficiency is paramount. The blade system achieves efficiencies through design as they encorporate the power supplies and fans required for the servers.

This means that the PSU's run more efficiently, running at, or close to, their peak efficiency.  The type of PSU in servers runs more efficiently the more it is loaded too. On a traditional rack-mount server the power supply is not operating within it's most efficient range and therefore wastes power and produces more heat.

In addition, the blade system is able to dynamically monitor and regulate power to each server, if required, in order to optimise power usage and limit heat output.

Blade systems can achieve 40% more efficiency than traditional rack servers through their design.

Managebility

Everything from pressing the power buttons to presenting CD or floppy drives is possible remotely with Blade. The only thing you can't do is physically change components or remove the server from the chassis. Everything else is possible from 1 management console, and this can be managed anywhere in the world. You don’t physically have to be at the same location as the servers

As standard, it is possible to manage all 16 servers in a chassis from a single "virtual" management console for the chassis and no KVM is required, thus removing the cost for KVM cabling.

Flexibility

Complexity brings with it costs – more staff to manage, more products connected to each other, more energy use to run, more energy use to cool, more floor space required, more points of failure to contend with. Adding more servers to this already complex situation incurs greater costs and takes time to integrate.

Using virtualised applications with Blade it is possible to reduce these costs and increase the adaptability of your environment. In essence this means that you can move any server to any chassis and have it maintain it's identity, disks connections via the SAN and network identity.

This means that in the event of a server failure it is a matter of just swapping the server and turning it on. There is no SAN or storage system configuration and no network configuration to take into account. This presents a single consistent identity regardless of the hardware and adding additional servers to this infrastructure is just as easy.
 
IDC report 60 -70% of costs associated to the datacentre are on-going expense, such as pay roll. Adding more servers in future doesn’t mean adding more people.

Space

Blade technologies allow you to consolidate your existing infrastructure by bringing all the components into a single system. This gives a reduction in space requirements of over 45% versus traditional rack mount environments.

The same space required to support 64 blades would only support 42 1U rack mount servers. The reality is that if you currently have 42 racks servers, on average you would only need 3 Blades for the same compute power (dependant on age of old infrastructure and applications being used).

Cabling

The connectivity in a Blade system is more efficiently used and more flexible and only has to be cabled once for the chassis, instead of once for every server that is installed or removed. This reduces wiring by up to 90%.

Connectivity

Given the consolidation of general infrastructure this results in a reduction of connectivity requirements versus a rack mount environment and this reduces cost  significantly.

The per port cost for server connections in a Blade system are nearly 75% less than that of SAN connections. If a SAN connection costs approx £400 and a Blade connection £125, over just 4 servers, a saving of over £1,000 is immediately recognised by using Blade.

These savings and more can be recognised and our experts would like to help you explore the difference we can make to your bottom line by utilising a Blade environment  from one of our key partners.

Key Partners: