Firms Cut Their Teeth on Blade Servers - Page 2

Fine young cannibals
Egenera and RLX have already been touched upon. Both are understandably proud to be surviving, early movers. Both are confident that they are far ahead of the competition. Egenera just last week launched its new two-way blades powered by new Intel 2.80 Ghz chips, while RLX unveiled its fourth-generation ServerBlade 1200i, in addition to a new control tower and clustering software. Egenera's value proposition is different from the other players. For one, it's currently positioned to run Linux, with support for Microsoft's Windows .Net server coming in 2003. For another, Susan Davis, Vice President of Product Marketing & Management at Egenera, noted the other firms aren't capitalizing on the potential that blades have to offer.

"A lot of competitors want to offer very dense blades with a lot less power," Davis told internetnews.com. "That was never our focus. Our goal was: 'How do I take datacenter infrastructure and move it to cheaper environment without giving up reliability and manageability.'"

Davis said the chief reason why major companies are concentrating on the low-end is that they want to keep blades away from their high-margin servers. Again, cannibalization is the driving fear.

Although RLX, like the major vendors, focuses on low-end, Bob Stearns, a former chief technology officer at Compaq, now a board member of and investor in RLX, said the larger companies should be fearful. He believes blades will ultimately replace large servers.

"I see server blades replacing servers in many instances if the applications scale out," Stearns said. "It's possible for high density concentrations of servers to replace older types of systems. And any company that doesn't cannibalize themselves gets cannibalized by competitors."

Moreover, Stearns is happy that the major players have come to the blade server table, claiming that it validates what startups like RLX have been working on for years.

Analysts don't seem to believe firms will be any worse for wear for being late entrants. After all, there is still the issue of standards to be hashed out.

One standard to rule them all; one dissenter to question them
Last February, Gartner Dataquest published a host of blade server studies. One of the issues that stood out is that of standards.

"A lack of standards will be a primary market inhibitor as many end users will be reluctant to install a blade server that appears to be proprietary. This restriction on blade server demand will encourage the development of a standard designed specifically for blade servers to which the worldwide server vendors adhere," said Jeffrey Hewitt, principal analyst covering servers for Gartner Dataquest's Computing Platform Worldwide group. "The acceptance of such a standard should help reduce end-user inhibition to install blade servers."

Currently, the standby is the CompactPCI standard. Developed in the mid-1990s, this once-solid standard is widely acknowledged by analysts and industry players to be almost Jurassic when folks talk about what they expect to get out of blades. InfiniBand is another standard garnering much attention as a possible replacement to PCI delivery, but this has yet to gain the momentum experts expected of it.

And while many analysts are bullish about blade servers' prospects, others, such as John Enck, VP & Research Director of Server and Directory Strategies at Gartner, are careful in what they tell their clients who inquire about the hype.

"The market for blade servers is very immature right now," Enck told internetnews.com. "Right now customers are looking at what's out there and it is very confusing, with HP, Compaq, Dell and the rest of them all coming at this from radically different angles."

How good are the blades that are out there? Enck said as far as products for plain ole Web serving, that most are adequate, but as far as handling a complex workload, most are not up to it.

"Much of this is because the software is not equipped to do the provisioning that is necessary," Enck said. "Now, these companies have the right idea, it is just very difficult to navigate this. I tell my clients the 2-year ROI [timetable] of this is worth waiting on."

Enck said there are also misconceptions. Without picking on any vendors technology in particular, he said the idea that blade servers are much less power consumptive isn't true.

"Do the math," Enck said. "When you load up a rack server with blades, the power output is actually higher [than large servers] because the density is greater. Right now, it's just not panning out. Everyone is trying to find a general value proposition."

Enck also took exception to the fact that many vendors are downplaying the importance of standards for blades, which he said can be attributed to the fact that, of course, the vendors love their own proprietary technologies.

"Standards have to make it useful," Enck said. "It's not just about being able to put HP blades in an IBM chassis. Look at the Intel-based server market. It had no momentum until vendors started to agree. With blades, vendords need to find the right connection for blades. Different designs sport different standards and if they can't agree what interconnects them there will be no maturity."