Looking at the Blade age of UNIX Server

According to IDC's latest 2011 First quarter server Market research report, Blade Server maintained a rapid growth momentum, shipments rose 5.4% (0.4% in the previous quarter), factory revenue rose 23.8% (the previous quarter is 12.6%), reached 1.8 billion dollars, accounts for 15.2% of total Server market revenue (13.4% in the previous quarter). In contrast, the overall revenue growth of the server market is 12.1%, about half the growth of the blade server. Obviously, blade server is steadily upgrading its position, has been more and more users recognized.

Blade server Growth Power--the trend of cloud computing era

Blade server is becoming more and more popular, I think it is with the changes in the IT environment, in short, is the server virtualization and on the basis of the development of cloud computing wave.

Few people now seem to overlook server virtualization, whether you use it or not. With the development of server virtualization technology, the benefits are becoming more and more obvious, which makes the IT architecture based on virtualization become more and more mainstream, and in this mainstream, the private cloud of different scale will surely be an inevitable choice of large and medium-sized enterprises.

An important concept of cloud computing is efficient automated management, which is critical to provisioning and supplying the underlying IT resources, and therefore requires a very good level of coordination and unified management of the underlying platform. From this point of view, it coincides with the blade server's compact, uniform, manageable features. On the other hand, cloud computing has the idea of pooling different classes of resources from traditional it architectures, thus abstracting enterprise IT resources at a higher, more integrated level, such as server resources being abstracted into a pool of computing resources, and storage becoming pools of storage resources, which are connected through network resource pools, This architecture has transformed the enterprise's IT architecture into an abstract, large computer, not an isolated island of resources in the past. This change in the trend makes the compute-focused blades stand out.

In the past, the blade server, due to its physical design limitations, was not able to achieve high scalability like a rack server, and was considered a self-sustaining server because it required the support of external storage, which many people at the time seemed to be a nuisance. However, in the era of cloud computing, do you find that this feature is not exactly the same as the concept of "pooling of resources"? The so-called resource focus is--storage and computing resources as much as possible to focus on the unity, so as to eliminate the waste of resources-the server is responsible for the calculation of the local storage only need to meet the most basic temporary requirements, do not need to configure too many hard disk slots. All in all, when resources are focused on the pool (which is not limited to virtualization, in terms of management It includes a unified management of physical resources, and you'll see a simple and efficient, well-defined, computing and storage-scalable It platform that is the foundation for cloud computing.

In addition, many times it product technology progress is not isolated, but complementary. When the blade server was born, the corresponding technical field also opened and began to develop, based on the application of the blade model and concept also began to explore, today, the Blade Server basic Support SSD (can easily reach the previous need for more than a traditional hard disk to obtain the IOPS response ability), SAN-based non-local storage and system startup is no longer new, the Mezzanine expansion card (Mezzanine) has been very mature, which in turn has played an important role in the development of Blade server, but also made the blade server front-end high density processing capacity and unified management advantages have been more play, This feature is what the future cloud platform needs.

As the IDC Enterprise Server Research manager Jed Scaramella said, Blade server in 2011 to achieve double-digit growth, is with the current more and more customers need a converged system to better support virtualized environment inseparable. Apparently, the blade servers that were born more than 10 years ago seem to be preparing for today's cloud computing era. Looking at the current mainstream IaaS cloud computing platforms, such as HP's BladeSystem Matrix, IBM's Cloudburst, and Cisco's UCS, are based on the blade server architecture. Obviously, the blade is the best bearing platform for the cloud has been universally agreed.

(Responsible editor: admin)