Today IBM announced the launch of a beta test with select partners, clients and vendors for their upcoming BladeCenter S. First announced in late June, the BladeCenter S will be the first desktop blade server system in addition to enhancements such as a wizard-based setup. The beta test announcement confirms that IBM is on-track and moving along with development of the BladeCenter S. But why is this so great?
Obligatory PR photo showcasing the microwave-sized BladeCenter S in a cubicle.
First off, what’s a blade server?
A blade server is a small server built for high-density applications that relies on a blade enclosure to be utilized. Blades are much smaller than traditional rack-mount 1U servers and each blade enclosure can support many blades with power, cooling, networking and things like SAN storage, although blades may utilize their own disks. The end result is a more efficient, hot-swappable server setup with less power and space consumption.
Blades are also easier to maintain with the ability to swap out faulty blades quickly in emergency situations.
Due to their higher efficiency than rack-mount servers, which each have their own power supplies and cooling units, blades often find themselves used in situations where power and real estate consumption is limited (such as in Carnegie Mellon’s DARPA Tahoe and cluster computing applications).
What the BladeCenter S does differently
Up until now, blade server enclosures have been typically mounted in a datacenter with floor to ceiling racks along with other blade enclosures and individual rack-mount servers. IBM BladeCenter S blades and enclosures don’t need any special requirements and can simply be put on a table, plugged into a standard US 110V power outlet and work without any issue.
More importantly, IBM has incorporated software to limit the typical heavy reliance upon certified, professional IT administrators to configure the blades, allowing “clients to easily deploy blade systems following a wizard-based installation interface.” Put this in the context of a small business or even a startup and you can see the gains – reduced setup and maintenance costs.
While IBM aims the BladeCenter S at small to medium-sized businesses, I find it even more fitting for startups. Granted I have essentially no business experience beyond what I read on the Intarwebs, technical needs with startups is all about being able to scale and handle going from unknown to 15k+ users while keeping the bill low until your VC/Angels come through with the money (or without funding if you prefer Getting Real). Blades are ideal for that situation; start with one blade on launch day, add two more when you start getting 100 new users per hour and so on. You can have the BladeCenter S enclosure and a T3 line in your office, making it easy to manage your hardware without having a dedicated IT guy waiting on you hand and foot. When its time to move to a managed datacenter or colo, BladeCenter S blades are compatible with all IBM BladeCenter blades so you can just move them out, while retaining the BladeCenter S enclosure to run as a local development/intranet rig.
In conclusion, I couldn’t think of anything else to write about. However, school started today and I’m taking quite a few computer science classes: CS1050 – Discrete Math, CS3750 – User Interface Design, CS4001 – Computing & Society (probably the hardest but the most interesting – the textbook talks about things like intellectual property, internet law, encryption, computer crime, etc), CS4660 – Educational Technology, in addition to wrapping up my web dev work for Georgia Tech Solar Decathlon, being a pseudo blog consultant for the admissions office and participating on the Registrar’s Advisory Board.
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Discrete Math, that is going to be fun material. You plan on solving the traveling salesman problem this semester?
I’d love to take the Computing and Society class. I’ve always been interested in IP and copyright issues. If I could drop out of life right now, I’d go back to school to be an IP lawyer. I’d love to tackle some of the big corporate groups that make DMCA claims that are spurious, at best.
As for the servers. Great stuff. Blade servers are a great development, and I’ve worked with some nice setups in the past. This system seems like it may have the ability to break down into the SMB market, at least at the upper end, which is probably IBM’s goal, since more and more SMBs are going to Dell.
Uhhh, what about noise? No way in hell I’d want a blade cluster in my cubicle with all those fans. Or are they showing off in a cubicle as a marketing gimmick to tout their “wizard” . . . woohoo, whatever.
-danny
IBM stinkblade is the real name. Virtual BS… The system is so Cluster Fu*K IBM should have named it FCenter…
It’s one of the crappiest boxes to manage… try to create a server and you’ll find out all the bs you’d have to go….
I’ll take any sun blades 1U over the Eye bee who?
I work on BladeCenter at IBM, but even I wouldn’t recommend startups having servers or T3s in their offices. The reliability alone is a killer, not to mention lead time and financing issues.
Dude, maybe before you talk about why a business should use any vendor specific box, you might want to check out the equivalent products from competition. HP has the same box that is already available to sell to customers while IBM is only coming out with that end of the year. And if you looked at that HP equivalent, its actually better than IBM. So… be better informed.
@bladed-jaded – I am aware that there are many providers for blade servers, but does HP have a desktop one? The BladeCenter S is advertised as being the first desktop blade server system.
Paul, BladeCenter S is not a desktop blade server. If that means it can act like a desktop being an SMB type that you can put on a table sure. But compared to HP, it’s pretty far off. HP has 2 types of these “desktop” blade server systems, as you put it. It has a rack and tower type that it came up with quite a few months before IBM came out with the Blade S. These are called the BladeSystem c-3000. It can put in as much as 16 blade servers in an 6U space while IBM can only put 6 blade servers in a 7U space. That’s pretty far off especially in terms of density.
Thanks for the reply reverie. Needless to say I wrote this post some 2 years ago when I was not up on my data center foo. It would be a bit different if I wrote this today with what I now know.
Thanks for stopping by – hope you’ll stop by more often!
Best,
Paul