By James Gaskin
HP's c3000 aims at medium and small businesses.
If you're drooling over the advances in the world of blade servers, wishing you could afford a rack or two of them, that day may arrive sooner than you think. Looking to replace the jumble of servers stacked in the storage closet, er, server room? Don't have a fancy raised floor and heavy duty air conditioner? No problem.
Of course, if you read about the heavy power requirements for a rack full of blades, such as three phase power modules, you figure blades will elude you forever. When you read about problems large companies have cooling a cabinet full of 64 blade servers, all with two processors and 32GBs of RAM generating heat like the August sun, you may be glad to avoid such headaches.
But the truth is blade servers create less heat, and require less power, than stand-alone servers with the same horsepower. They just need the power and cool air in one small spot. Second generation blade server chassis now do a better job dispersing the heat generated by blades than ever before, and cooling product vendors have adapted their tools to better handle the heat created by racks of blade servers. Still takes work, but it is getting easier.
Even better, HP now has a smaller blade enclosure system called the c3000, or Shorty. The company based the unit on the enterprise class c7000 blade enclosure used by the big data centers, so many parts from the high end system work in the c3000, such as the special cooling fans. Aiming at branch offices of large companies, HP actually made a great “introductory” blade server system for small and midsize businesses.
The best thing about the c3000 for small businesses is its ability to run in the same kind of environment your current servers do: the “nothing special” environment. It runs on power from a normal 120 volt wall socket. It runs in rooms cooled by standard office air conditioning. In other words, you can get a blade system and treat it as badly as you treat your current servers. There's no need to upgrade your storage closet/server room.
Blade system vendors say the price for blades evens out with stand-alone servers when buying five servers. You have to amortize the cost of the chassis over five servers to get the individual server cost down to match similar stand-alone server pricing. While it's more efficient to provide power and cooling fans in the chassis for multiple servers rather than in each case for stand-alone servers, that does drive up the cost of the chassis. Blade production volumes continue to increase, but traditional servers still get lower pricing from higher volume production runs.
Full height blade servers aren't much smaller than the rackable 1U pizza box style servers they replace. They moved the cooling and power supplies off the server motherboard into the chassis, but they didn't make a huge leap in server density. Blades reduced management overhead and did away with 9 of 10 cables used inside a normal rack, but the server density didn't jump way up.
HP's half height blades, however, pack two complete servers into the same space as one of their full height blade slots. Since the c3000 Shorty chassis can handle four full height blades, eight half height blades, or any combination that works mathematically, you can choose exactly what your blade server system includes.
These second generation blade servers, both full and half height, include more storage options onboard and storage blades, packed with hard disks rather than processors, provide additional capacity as well. The release of 3.5 inch hard drives with 1 terabyte of data space really allows you to pack plenty of storage into a small space. In this case, pack it into a small slot.
Blade technology dominates future plans in large data centers. For the first time, small and growing businesses can jump into blade territory without worrying about concentrated cooling and power demands faced by the enterprise data centers.
Keep an eye on Network World's review pages. Tom Henderson, a fellow member of the Test Alliance, has a c3000 on his testing bench for review right now.
Although vendors only promise you'll come out even price-wise if you buy five blade servers, you should plan ahead a little. If you need three servers now, or even two, check out the c3000, especially if you know your next server purchase will be within a few months.
Like the book from the '70s said, small is beautiful. Small and powerful, however, is gorgeous.
