10 things users need to know before buying a blade server

As a http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/8510.html ">it Manager, users may encounter many vendors who advertise their solutions for better, more cost-effective, more efficient, and so on. Many new products and technologies will use marketing strategies after they are launched, but what happens if we throw away a lot of marketing hype and implement the facts? At present, what can the blade server do for the user? After we get rid of those exaggerated propaganda, does the manufacturer's propaganda around the blades still hold up? Let's take a look at 10 things users need to know before buying a blade server.

1. Blade Server uses less power

This propaganda may be true. In fact, blade servers are 28% more power-saving than traditional servers. The power supply in the blade chassis is distributed throughout the chassis, so a more energy-saving configuration is a chassis full of blade servers. Each blade server allocates a power supply that is specified by the manufacturer, and some vendors specify performance that is better than those specified by other vendors. However, the overall power consumption of the blade server is significantly lower than the traditional blade server. There are also software that can allocate more or less power to specific blades depending on the needs of a single blade server.

Comments: New design technology innovation turns exaggerated propaganda into hope.

2. Blade server requires less cooling

This is not true in the early blade servers, which were 5 of years ago. The air flow in the early blade server and chassis is not good enough. However, blade servers and chassis are now designed much better than they were a few years ago.

The processor, memory, and power supply are the most heat-generating components in the computer. Compared to the early blades, the current blade server standard not only consumes less power but also reduces heat loss by 10% to 25%. The power supply is not the only project that is currently redesigned, and some vendors are using solid-state drives, and solid-state drives are virtually free of heat compared to traditional hard drives because they do not have rotating components. To reduce the cooling capacity of the blade server, the manufacturer not only uses the mobile processor to save power, but also reduces the heat dissipation. For those who do not use solid-state drives, these manufacturers opt for a 2.5-inch hard drive with a smaller power consumption and less heat dissipation than the standard 3.5-inch hard drive.

Most blade servers use a 2.5-inch hard drive with a higher failure rate than the 3.5-inch SATA hard disk used in a non-blade server. However, this situation will change over time.

Comments: Believe in this aspect of publicity, but to be smart to contrast the manufacturer's products.

3. Blade server lowers user's total cost of ownership

Owning the total cost may be the most extreme term used in the technical business. What vendors do for their users is to reduce their total cost of ownership, but this is usually after a significant amount of money is invested in the upfront solution. By reducing the overall power cost of computing electricity and data center cooling, the blade will certainly reduce the total cost of ownership for the user.

So can blade servers significantly reduce costs in other ways? The blade takes up less rack space. This means that users will pay less money in a hosted environment. The blade server uses commercially standard hardware, so using a blade server will save maintenance and management costs.

New traditional server deployments require a lot of planning for power, cooling, networking, and footprint requirements. These requirements were canceled when the blade server was applied. Because of the modular nature of the blade server, a new blade server connected to the blade chassis immediately has the power, network, and shared management interface configuration.

Comments: Blade servers can provide a number of savings and reduce the total cost of users.

4. Virtualization

After having the total cost, virtualization has received more media attention. Virtualization uses a very powerful server to drive more servers. Each virtual server runs as if it has its own memory, hard disk space, processors, and other resources. Virtualization and blade servers are tailored to the needs of the data center, since both are modular in nature. This modular nature allows the workload to be isolated or dispersed between server clusters. Current virtualization products Create virtualized server pools that spread consolidated service workloads across multiple blades. Consolidating servers through virtualization maximizes modern availability and lowers costs.

Comments: Virtualization and blade servers are the future of the data center.