Egenera Blog

I’d like to add one more myth to the mix: Blades aren’t appropriate for the enterprise…

Because of some of the myths debunked in Barb’s article, there is a perception that blades are better suited for low-mid range applications. While this might be true for some bladed platforms, it’s not the case in general.

Blades have made tremendous progress since they were first introduced in the early part of the decade. Back then, most blades were just smaller versions of rack mount servers, often with less functionality. Most of those blade vendors are no longer on the market (see RLX), as customers quickly decided that the blade form factor was good, but it had to service the entire data center, not just the edge.

Meanwhile, Egenera has always had the enterprise in mind. With the introduction of the BladeFrame in October of 2001, the product debuted with IO consolidation, IO virtualization, hardware and software high availability, redundant paths with active failover, optimizations for 4-sockets and large memory, and so on. You get the picture…the product was always built for the enterprise. Blades were a convenient form factor.

As traditional server vendors entered the blade market, they started introducing technology that was first seen in the BladeFrame - integrated switches, RDMA capability, management modules, and now recently, IO virtualization (see HP Virtual Connect and IBM Virtual Fabric Architecture). The result is more bladed products ready for enterprise use.

You might think this is bad for Egenera, but it’s not. It’s a validation of the architectural choices we made many years ago. PAN Manager remains incredibly unique in the market, as hardware is not as interesting without the right software to manage it.

So, another myth debunked. Blades are the fastest growing segment in the server market for good reason.