Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

As technology became more central to Goldman Sachs' business, Brownell's IT department needed to move increasingly quickly to deploy new applications. As CTO, Brownell realised that the obstacles to achieving this were primarily physical: acquiring server hardware, installing it, and connecting it to networks and storage. Furthermore, in the face of a mounting skills shortage, finding the system administrators to perform these labour- and time-intensive tasks became increasingly difficult. Routinely, he says, it took six weeks or more to deploy a new machine.

"Over the years, I witnessed the pain points most CIOs suffer the most," says Brownell. But when he approached the companies that supplied Goldman Sachs' hardware to come up with a satisfactory solution to this challenge, they were not forthcoming. Brownell decided to put his own ideas to work: in 2000, he formed his own company, Egenera.

Egenera is one of a host of both new and established hardware companies that has latched on to the 'pain points' that organisations face in managing highly distributed and complex server architectures. As businesses grow and an increasing amount of corporate applications are accessed over the Internet, organisations typically add more servers. As a result, data centres are spilling over with servers that have become difficult to manage and costly to maintain.

The solution Egenera is proposing – alongside industry heavyweights such as IBM, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems – is the blade server.

The basic premise of blade servers, which contain the equivalent of an entire server on a single board, is to squeeze as much computing power into as little space as possible (see box, What is a blade server?). By installing these servers in their organisations, claim the blade vendors, IT departments can slash the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their server architecture, significantly reduce application deployment times, and more easily manage distributed servers.

"The blade server form factor has been serving telecommunications companies for years – it's not new," explains Tom Bradicich, director of architecture and design for IBM's eServer X-Series division. "What is new is that the technology is moving into the mainstream enterprise server market."

Currently, IT departments tend to add more server power in 'racks', deploying one- or two-processor servers as Internet demand increases. While these rack systems are relatively dense compared with high-end, multi-processor servers, says Bradicich, they are difficult to manage, can take hours or even days to deploy, and if one goes down, it is hard to diagnose precisely where the problem lies because they are so dispersed.

But how do blade servers differ from traditional servers, other than cosmetically? The key benefit of a blade server, argues Bradicich, is ease of management. "You can quickly replace a blade and put it back into the rack like a book in a bookshelf. This means organisations can upgrade and replace applications in seconds instead of minutes."

Because they are supported by sophisticated management software – typically contained on one of the blades themselves and linked to a central administration console – managing application performance, load balancing and allocation of resources is all centralised.

For organisations that have highly dispersed computing architectures, this could allow them to make significant cost savings in terms of both staffing and property expenses. One UK financial institution based in the City of London, for example, plans to replace its existing data centre – consisting of some 56 computer rooms dispersed at various points around the City, with just two data centres located 20 miles apart, by centralising its architecture onto blades.

Furthermore, the fact that a greater number of servers can be contained in the same chassis, sharing cooling, power and cabling resources, means the cost and provision of these basic resources can be amortised over a greater number of systems. With traditional servers, organisations pay for these features on a server-by-server basis.

Despite their apparent benefits, however, blade servers are still very much in the 'early adopter' phase. Although a host of start-ups have launched blade designs during the past several quarters, only two of the major hardware vendors – Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Compaq – have actually brought blade products to market so far, although IBM, Dell and Sun Microsystems are expected to follow during the second half of 2002. According to conservative estimates from analyst company Gartner, worldwide shipments of blade servers will reach just 900,000 units in 2002 and will only surpass 1 million by around 2006.

One of the key reasons for this slow adoption is doubts over how these servers will interoperate with users' existing infrastructures. "The underlying hardware and application software will follow the same standards. But the designs of the blades themselves will differ from in the past," explains Gartner analyst Adrian O'Connell. Because the low-end server market has become so commoditised, he adds, vendors may find it in their best interests not to promote interoperability between their hardware or management software and those of other vendors in order to achieve a higher degree of customer lock-in.

"This is something users have to weigh up for themselves," advises O'Connell. "They need to ask themselves, 'Six months down the line, am I constrained to stay with this vendor?'"

So how should organisations approach integrating the new blade architecture into what they have already? Andreas Knoepfli, vice president of the industry standard server group for Compaq in Europe, advises prospective users to ensure blades comply with existing industry standards in areas such as systems management software, IP connectors and interfaces with storage systems. "Some of the start-ups in this market are suggesting that companies rip out their existing infrastructure. [Blade servers] should not replace what they already have, [they] should be incremental to what is there already," he advises.

Organisations should also bear in mind what type of applications they intend to run on the blade servers. As Peter Roberts, UK sales director of distributed computing specialist Platform Computing, points out, the fact that the vast majority of blades run either Windows or the open source operating system Linux means that organisations will be restricted to running Linux- and Windows-compatible applications.

Both HP and Compaq concede that they anticipate the greatest adoption of their blade products to be at the front end of the data centre, performing simple web caching, load balancing and web serving functions. "We see blades as a more cost-effective way to deploy thin rack servers than the way they are deployed today. We're not trying to replicate our high-end machine," says Jon Jacob, European mid-range server marketing manager at HP.

Although most of the early models of blade servers operate on a single processor, the introduction of two- and four-way blades over the next few quarters will allow organisations to scale up the kind of applications they run on them. Dell, for example, plans to launch its first blade server product in the second half of 2002, which will be dual-processor. "You could have a full office on one single chassis, containing a virtual private network, a groupware application such as Notes or Exchange, plus all the usual server functions," explains John Bailey, UK server business development manager at Dell.

Analysts at Gartner believe that the introduction of blades is a "market disrupter", a 'bump' in the server market cycle that will allow users to take advantage of new technology and vendors to take share from competitors. But with this bump in the market comes a need for caution. "The demand for front-end web servers has been critical in driving the need [for blade servers], but in reality, the market is only just beginning to understand how blade servers might be deployed and used," says O'Connell.

Brownell of Egenera has, naturally, more conviction. Having given up his CTO job at Goldman Sachs to develop a new server architecture that he hopes will ease management and lower costs for IT departments, he has much to lose if the market does not take off.

"Blade is definitely a step in the right direction," he enthuses. "Ultimately, it will be the way servers are built."