Discussion on the experience of selecting the attention items of Blade server

The combination of blade technology and server virtualization can provide a powerful foundation to build the next generation of data centers, which is part of the server consolidation effort.

This article is recommended to help you decide if the blade technology will meet your consolidation plan and when and where to match your plans.

Server positioning: remote location or central location

If you plan to integrate server systems, but still need a certain server to be located in remote locations, then blade technology will greatly simplify your management challenges. Blade technology has a strong remote http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/17569.html "> management function, means that IT staff can be in the remote location of the blade system to complete management, Includes each task, with the exception of physical hardware Exchange. This blade technology Chassis management module can provide remote control capabilities, can be hardware diagnostics, reboot, or even turn off some features. Blade technology can also simplify some of the site's physical tasks, which are done primarily through a read-only indicator, such as indicating which blade is problematic, so that even a non skilled employee can replace the problematic blade with a new blade.

Blade management features can be integrated with other management tools such as IBM Director, HP Insight Manager, Dell OpenManage, and Microsoft management tools. And, in terms of software configuration and provisioning, more and more software tools can ultimately be qualified for this process, including the tools of some large manufacturers, including small manufacturers such as Altiris, Cyclades (acquired by the Avocent group) and Ardence.

Problems of space resources

Compared with traditional rack-type servers, blade technology can save a lot of space resources. However, because of the high density of the blades, you have to take into account the power-driven and refrigeration problems. Huge chassis and racks may be more than you can afford to drive and datacenter refrigeration.

In some cases, the consolidation and consolidation of data centers that continue to use traditional rack servers may make space resources quite restrictive, which means that new data centers need to be built. In these cases, blade technology can provide significant cost savings. When a new data center has to be built, there is no doubt that designing a device that uses blade technology will create a new model of the equipment to produce a true next-generation data center.

Follow the dynamic configuration principle

If you are consolidating servers in a central location, and some servers are idle in some locations, you can configure these idle servers to other applications and regions depending on the time zone, providing some additional consolidation and savings. Through their modular approach, blade technology can handle and drive this process, as long as it is combined with the software that is provided and needs to be configured. If the blades used are anonymous and can obtain resources from the storage Local Area network (SAN), the process will become more straightforward. Virtual technology software can add additional processing layers, which require multiple virtual server provisioning and need to have a variety of blades available at all times.

Number of servers

Because the different blades share the public component resources in the chassis, the investment cost of the chassis and blades is roughly balanced. In general, the balance is that the investment of each chassis is equal to the investment of 5-6 blades. So if you have fewer than 5 servers in a certain location, then don't expect any big development, this blade may not be the best option. As more and more blades are added to the chassis, the cost of each blade will be reduced as they share some of the public resources (such as energy dynamics, refrigeration, conversion modules, etc.). However, there is a need to fully configure the site and rack according to the refrigeration capacity of your data center. This, of course, also needs to be limited by the number and capacity of technical staff in the evaluation, planning, and execution processes.

Types of application software

Despite increasing CPU performance in blades, blades cannot keep pace with the growth of high-performance computing tasks. The increasing number of applications requires a strong CPU and even a large number of processors in a single system image, and this type of application may be more suitable for rack servers (although some blade manufacturers in the field are debating this). In contrast, expanding applications require many servers to run the same applications (such as Web servers, some application servers, and some database servers), which are more suitable for integrated and managed blade technology.

Another area that has been hugely attracted by Blade technology is the "packaged data center" approach, in which a blade server system configures all the components needed for remote sites. For example, you can configure a chassis system to have a network server, an application server, a database server, a transformation module, and so on, and include firewall tools, download balancing tools, and all the things that are appropriate for storage or storage connectivity (NAS or SAN).