SINGAPORE: Global server giant Hewlett Packard is reinforcing its leadership position in the Asia-Pacific blade-server market. This came out at a two-day conference on 'Improving Business Agility with Blades' that was organized by HP in Singapore.

The company’s recent initiative in the space includes the launch of two new Xeon-based blades servers—Xeon 2.8 and Xeon 3.06—and the recent announcement of upgrades and benchmarks for its existing entry-level ProLiant e class and the higher-end ProLiant p class servers.

What’s more, development work for blade desktop system is currently on and the company is planning a commercial release sometime next year. The product will ensure a much cleaner workspace with only the monitor, keyboard and docking station at the desk—with the big boxes being moved to server room as blades.

According to Gartner Asia Pacific hardware and systems VP Mathew Boon, "Blade servers will become an integral part of many organizations' future server infrastructures within the next three years."
For HP this is good news. At 42 percent, it already has the largest market share for blades, followed by IBM at 24 percent, Dell at 18 percent and Sun at about six percent, according to a recent Gartner Dataquest study.

THE BLADES MARKET
Currently, blades are seeing an early-adoption in mature markets such as Singapore and Australia. According to the Gartner report on the Asia-Pacific blades market, about 10 percent enterprises surveyed in Australia and Singapore have adopted blades, while about 30 percent plan to do so in the next 12 months.

But, the scene in countries like India is different. Only about two percent of the companies surveyed have deployed blades, while a whopping 80 percent say that they don't plan to buy blades in the next one year. The reason for early adoption in markets such Japan, the US and Singapore may be that it is here that space and manpower come at a premier. And, blades promise both savings on space and the ease of manageability and minimum human intervention, freeing people up to do other work.

In India, on the other hand, while the 1P and 2P tower-style servers still rule the roost, blades may find a potential market in MNCs and BPOs, who may have tried and liked blades elsewhere and may want to adopt them in India.
"Though the initial acquisition and infrastructure costs of blades are high, given their functionality and flexibility, the breakeven cost for customers will come at around 15 blades," according to, HP Asia Pacific industry standard servers director Tony Parkinson.

WHAT ARE BLADE SERVERS
An entry-level blade server looks like and is slightly larger than a motherboard, and has one or more processors, primary memory (RAM) and secondary memory (hard disk). Its width is less than one span and length less than two. The two and four processor blades are, of course, larger. Many such blades, be they 1P, 2P or 4P, are stacked in a single rack chassis and are plugged onto the back of the chassis. The chassis is further divided into enclosures, each housing a set of blades. All the blades in an enclosure share resources-cables, power supply, cooling fans-thereby saving on space. To get an idea on the space being saved, consider that as many as 280 HP ProLiant BL 10e blades or 84 dual-processor Xeon-based IBM blades can fit in a single cabinet (six feet high) that would ordinarily accommodate 42 1U (1U=1.75 inches thick) rack servers.

Space saving is often touted as the biggest USP of blades. This is not true. It is not that when organizations deploy blades, they throw away legacy systems. The two often co-exist, being deployed for different purposes. The more compelling case for blades is in the flexibility that they offer. Since the acquisition cost of blades is quite high (HP's e class blades start at Rs.8 lakh for a single blade and a 10-blade enclosure), it is this flexibility and intelligent manageability that translates into a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). For example, you can remotely reconfigure blades, deploy different OSs or applications, schedule jobs for later, or provision them to take on different roles. The management software for such tasks is usually Web-browser based, giving the familiar look and feel. In terms of hardware, you don't have to fill up your chassis at one go; you can add more blades as and when you require and even run different combinations of applications and OSs in the blades in a chassis. Replacing a failed server is a matter of pulling out the server and plugging in another one.

Given this functionality and the high price of blades, they are meant for multi-server environments and cluster-computing setups where many applications need to be deployed. They could be used in data centers, banking, finance, government, etc. According to the Gartner report, in the government, finance and education verticals in Asia-Pacific, seven percent of the enterprises they surveyed have already deployed blades, while 10 percent plan to in the next 12 months. They may be used for work such as serving Web pages, caching, running anti-virus, firewall and DNS services and not for applications such as ERP and other mission-critical applications that require high-scalability. Blades come in primarily Pentiums or Xeons, with HP having introduced the Xeon 2.8 models almost nine months ago and the Xeon 3.06 about three months back. IBM, too, ships Xeon-based blades.

So, where do blades go from here and what will bring down the present premium pricing? They require developments in hardware and software, such as bringing in virtualization, fiber channel and iSCSI support, booting from external storage, modular I/O and compliance to standards.

(CNS)