Slashdot Mirror
Open Blade Servers?
Greg Smith points to this ZDNet story on new Intel chips aimed at blade servers, writing "Proprietary blade servers are coming on strong from IBM, Dell and HP. Where are the open blade servers? How did Google roll out 10,000 servers at such a low cost?"
If you're too lazy to read the article and don't know what a blade server is...
Server blades got their name because of their design. A blade server typically resembles a circuit board more than anything else. They're made to be stacked vertically. These types of servers are growing in popularity for more mundane tasks such as delivering Web pages or housing protective firewalls because they use less floor space and electricity than racks of traditional servers. Server blades also share a power supply, cables and memory, which further cuts down on costs and space. Although the down server market has dampened sales, analysts believe blades will eventually form a substantial part of the market.
Maybe I'm retarded, but I didn't immediately picture exactly what a blade server was when I saw the name...so there it is.
While I won't argue about the Pentium IV being designed around the need to advertise a higher clock speed (irregardless of what that means in terms of actual computing power), the Pentium III is a more mature design, and benefits from lots of improvements to its power consumption. In a blade server, power consumption is one of the main issues, thus using a PIII doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't use a Pentium IV if they could get away with it - they just can't afford the power/heat issues.
Now consider that fact with laptops using the P4 - that's one area where they can get away with it, at the cost of battery life...
The article is quite old now - March 19 - and HP appears to favour the blade servers from the former compaq. That being said the advantage that blade servers give is that they save a great deal of space, and make cabling much easier. In essence you can stuff a lot of proccessors in a rack, also put in a small disk farm, network switch using copper or fiber, and away you go.
Semper ubi sub ubi
Where Linux will really shine is the new PICMG-2.16 standard. It's an enhancement/alternative to CompactPCI where a chassis uses Ethernet signalling on the backplane instead of CompactPCI signals. That means a single chassis can have an intel, Sun, and/or motorola blade in the same chassis and they communicate via TCP/IP instead of hardware-specific signalling. It also means that a Linux-based blade can work in *any* manufacturers chassis. This removes a big barrier of entry for the Linux in the telecom market.
Other cool things about PICMG 2-16 Blades:
- Blades (like ethernet hosts) are more easily hot-swappable
- Depending on the chassis switch, bus speeds could approach 24GB/s in the near future
- Device drivers need only speak TCP/IP (one driver works on multiple blade operating systems)
For more info see: The Next Big Thing (pdf) and there might be something here since these guys designed part of the spec.500 % markup huh? I would still be in the hardware business if it was. You're way off.. Mod -3 uninformed and wrong.
Basically the entire hardware industry runs off slim margins.
I heard Dell runs at about 6%. Most distributors run a 1-2% margin, computer stores anywhere from 5-10%.
As for the manufacturers, I haven't a clue, but they must have astronomical costs.
Buying in bulk isn't that big of a deal anymore. When a company goes ITQ (invitation to quote) the vendors know they aren't going to win unless they at least halve their markup.
From there, they figured out a functional failover system and set up four geographically distributed data centers.
Oh, and they coded up a search engine thing at the same time.