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Open Blade Servers?

Posted by timothy on from the extensible dept.

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?"

2 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Open What? by coene · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A blade server is a hardware product, it really has nothing todo with software, outside of the Operating System Clustering/Scaling functionality.

    Google does not use blade servers, last I knew it was just a large amount of x86 boxes running Linux.

    Open Source hardware? Does that even make sense? Either have drivers (or release the specs) that allow your hardware to be used on an Open Source operating system, or dont.

    Want an "Open Source Blade Server"? Yeah, thats called an HP with Clustered Linux on each blade...

  2. Easy - by not using blade servers.... by mzito · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We won't see open blade servers for quite a while, if ever. Normal servers are only "open" because they use a common set of interconnects (standard power, ps/2 keyboard, 100BaseT), etc. On a blade server, you have to unify all of those interconnects in a hot-swappable fashion. The result? A customized connector and backplane architecture.

    In addition, there's no incentive for companies to open a standard for blade servers - they'll make more money by selling the chassis and blades, as well as the management software that is generally required for these types of servers.

    As far as Google goes, they rolled out their infrastructure for such a low cost because they did the following things:

    1) didn't use blade servers(more on that in a sec)
    2) bought in large quantities
    3) bought generic/semi-generic servers (by which I mean "not IBM")

    Not using blade servers was a sharp idea because the real advantages of blade servers come in certain particular situations. These include where power/heat/space is really expensive or where you need a lot of hosts without a lot of performance (like QA, staging and development environments). Remember, that while they use less space, power, etc., they also use laptop/low-power cpus and hard drives, so the performance can be lower, especially for i/o intensive operations. If you're not hugely space-constrained, using 1U servers will save you money in the long run.

    Thanks,
    Matt

    --
    me@mzi.to