Well, my problem with the blade systems I have used in the past are as follows:
1) Expensive and low power blades. After you figure in the cost of
the chassis, they ain't so cheap. If I was desperately low on rack
space, or if i was going to use so many of them that my data center
wasn't large enough then, the cost might be justified.
2) Performance. The blades I used in the past had laptop drives,
there's no way I'd make 10 Windows users suffer on a single blade.
But, it was amazing to see 16 blades in just 3U of rack space though.
Compute clusters, DNS servers, stuff like that... great use for these things.
3) Misc. weirdness and proprietary hardware: Strange network switch
built in, couldn't run Windows cuz it didn't have a video card on the
blades or anyway to share one... and Windows wouldn't install
headless. Solaris and Linux worked great though.
That being said, I am surfing the HP site for blade servers now, and
it appears that there has been a quantum leap in blade power, and
cost. I still think that the applications are limited. Your question
about why not a big SMP machine can be answered in a million
different ways, depending on which of the million different uses for
a computer you are considering. For instance, if you needed to run a
heavily used 10TB+ Data Warehouse, your gonna want that large SMP
machine. If you want to run 20 different applications, put `em on 20
blades instead of a bigger single box. I notice that HP has a
quad-Xeon blade with room for 12Gb of RAM and 2 SAN cards.... maybe
you CAN use a blade for a big DB. Well, I have learned something in
this thread.
At 10:12 AM 10/26/2005, Michael O'Keefe wrote:
Randall Shimizu wrote:
I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on PC blades. IBM (HP and
Clearcube make PC blades also )
(http://news.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=/10-5-0&fp=435e179035481b19&ei=HP5eQ6nXL8Oa6wH259HkCA&url=http%3A//www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml%3FarticleID%3D172303304&cid=1101960915
> ) has announced a new solutions offering with their Bladecenter
product. IBM has partnered with VMware to offer a virtualized
desktiop environment. According to IBM they can host from 10-15
clients on each blade. IBM"s solution is a VMware Citrix client for
those in the Windows group. 20 clients is what I heard on linux
terminal services.
So the question then becomes is the blade the right platform ....???
After all 10-20 not all that much. Would not a large SMP machine be
much more suitable.....?? Now of course scalability is entirely
different for Linux and Window, but does raise some interesting roi
questions....
I've used both IBM's and HP's blade systems at work.
I currently have the IBM's, but I preferred the HP's
I run vmWare's ESX product on each blade, and have 7 guest OS's (all
linux) on each, giving me about 80 hosts (IIRC)
I don't remember the cost, but I think it was something like $90k ?
So if that's correct, it runs about $1k/host
But that's more a vmWare ROI than a blade-center ROI answer....
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