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The ability to pack more server power into a smaller space has made blade servers an attractive technology. But with server density also comes cooling and power issues you need to get ready for.
Blade server technology offers the potential benefits of more servers in a smaller area that can be easily managed and maintained. They also generate a lot of heat. If you're considering these ultra- compact servers for your data center, pay special attention to how you are going to keep things cool. All About BladesA blade server is a full server packed onto a thin, ultra-dense card, sort of like an oversized PC add-in card. On the card are processor chips, memory, and storage, but no power supply or cooling fan. Power and cooling come from the chassis that the blades are plugged into. Benefits of blades include:
Reduced space requirements: You can stack eight times as many blade servers in a cabinet than you can conventional 1U (rack mounted) servers.
Better Power Utilization: Blade servers require 80 percent less power than 1U servers.
Better Server Management: The relative ease of the blade approach to server installation, plus management software, leads to flexible server and storage configuration.
Major vendors of blades include IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, and Dell. While blades accounted for only 4 percent of the worldwide server market in 2003, IDC predicts that number to increase to 27 percent by 2007.
Are Blades a Too-Hot Technology? The greater processing power per cubic foot of a tightly-packed blade server chassis is attractive. In some blade server designs, a standard 42U cabinet can hold as many as 300 blade servers. But all that power in such a small space creates a particular problem: heat. Consider the following:
Server cabinet or oven. A fully loaded blade server cabinet could generate more BTUs than a typical household oven and require...