Cost accounting analysis of deploying blade servers

Although the technology gap between http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13737.html "> Blade server and Rack server is getting smaller, But managers of data centers still need to consider not only the savings in footprint and higher initial costs, but also the specificity of their environment. With regard to the total amount of money, the purchase of Blades has no economic significance for companies that require only a small number of servers because they have to consider the cost of the chassis. In the case of HP, the cost of a blade exceeds that of a rack server when the number of servers in the company reaches 3-8 units. Assuming that the price of an HP c7000 additional Ethernet and Fibre Channel is $5697, the price of an HP bl460c Blade (priced at $6224) is approximately equivalent to the price of 4 HP DL360 servers (priced at $7152). Again high-end products, the use of Pass-thrus sans 7 bl460c blade server value of 65504 U.S. dollars, compared with the equivalent installation of 7 DL360 servers worth 65457 dollars equivalent.

In HP's view, the more blades you use, the more total cost of ownership (TCO) you will save. Using the same bl460c blades, HP advertised a TCO of 16 blades for 139156 dollars. The same rack configuration has a TCO of 228165 dollars and an additional expense of about 64%.

Currently, there is no standard chassis size. Industry leaders IBM and HP have chassis capacity with 14 and 16 blades respectively. But there is a clumsy rule that customers must buy at least half the number of servers, so that they can offset the cost of a blade relative to a rack-like server. However, because the chassis contains all the components needed to connect, transform, network, and power supplies, customers do not need to buy the ancillary equipment required by the rack-type servers. For companies that need 10 or more, blades are cheaper than rack-less servers.

"Usually people simply look at its initial situation," said David Marshall, president of Business development and product management at Inovawave. He is a virtualization performance software provider and author of Vmblog, and his blog includes Blade server and virtualization technology. "In a green environment, data centers expect to enhance server performance," Marshall said. When comparing the acquisition costs of blade and rack servers, it is also necessary to consider all the additional interconnected components as well as the hardware and software required, which are the standards that the blades will follow. When you are ready to increase the cost of the HBA (host bus modulator) card, also consider the Ethernet port and cable, power connection and Power allocation unit (PDUs), KVM Cable and switch, as well as software and hardware redundancy characteristics of management, in fact, the cost of the sub-item is even greater. ”

Therefore, if the company is prepared to purchase a large number of servers to improve overall performance, then the initial cost of the blade server compared to the rack-type server and the cost of the necessary ancillary equipment has a certain advantage.

The economics of Blade server and rack-type servers are rarely directly compared to the specifications. Richard Siedzik, president of the Communications and radio Communications Service at Bryant University in Smithfield, R.I, eventually chose the blade server. Siedzik compares the configuration of two stand-alone IBM P-series with 7 blade systems. Including the cost of storage, the price difference shows that the blade system is lower 30%~35% than the stand-alone system. In addition to the server, Siedzik said, "We will unify all the storage." If we have to buy a stand-alone server, then we have to connect them to each other and connect to the storage's conversion port. and 14 Blades of fiber network we only occupy two ports. But if it's a traditional server, we have to have 28 ports. That would be very expensive. ”

As Siedzik's practice shows, blade servers are relatively expensive to save. Once a blade base is configured, adding new servers is relatively quicker, which in turn reduces server waste.

For some blade manufacturers, it is a major selling point to combine machines with management software that can automatically allocate workloads. Susan Davis, vice president of marketing at blade maker Egenera, said, "We can save a lot of money on high availability, something our intuition doesn't feel." ”

In Egenera, the company's software Pan Manager (PAN Manager) allows system managers to share blades and dynamically allocate workloads as needed. "We can accommodate separate physical servers from any logical angle on that server," Davis said. "One of Egeneral's clients, who worked in financial institutions, used a blade server that was used during the day for trade applications and another operating system for batch reporting at night."

When they have not yet determined whether the blade is more persuasive economically than rack-like services, data center managers must also take into account several factors inherent in the company's environment. Overall, the more servers you need, the more money a blade will save on footprint and hardware costs. Not only that, when the blade is theoretically more advantageous than the rack-type server, it should also consider the original equipment, the current workload needs and future needs and so on. Replacing servers instead of simply improving performance will allow data center managers to reuse existing cables, switches, and power supplies, thereby reducing the cost of blade savings. And for companies to grow in the future, blades are more likely to help them succeed.