I was sitting in a hotel ballroom – outside, the warm California sun was luring me away from the cold air conditioning breeze I felt before the breakout panel began at the Server Blade Summit. The panel session was called “Blades and Virtualization,” which alone is a very broad topic – but this panel focused on technology solutions that effectively marry blades and virtualization. The other participants were from Liquid Computing and Hitachi America, whose solutions target high performance computing and server consolidation applications.
I found it interesting that both Hitachi America and Liquid Computing (as well as Egenera) have taken an integrated approach to delivering x86 computing resources. In fact all three participants on the panel leverage a bladed form factor (for us it’s delivered via our BladeFrame system) and some level of virtualization (however they’re focused on different target markets, such as high performance computing and server consolidation). The integration of these technologies – if done correctly – can truly deliver the goods in terms of business benefits.
A few things are clear:
- Blades: The industry has realized that blades are just a change in form factor. Blades provide great benefits of modularity and consolidated I/O, but the anticipated benefits of increased server density have been limited due to the fundamental limit of the number of servers that need to be powered/cooled.
- Virtualization: Now that we have a few years of experience, the industry is beginning to see that virtualization when used as a point solution is incomplete and faces availability challenges and management complexities (e.g. virtual machine sprawl). Also, the TCO savings could be limited to only 15% over non-VM environment (as one customer pointed out), especially since hypervisors only impact hardware operational costs (10% of total OPX) and actually increase the number of OS images that need to be managed.
Virtualization needs to be looked at from a holistic perspective at the data center level in order to bring out the benefits of management, availability and cost.