Tower To Blade - The Evolution Of Servers

From tower to rack and rack to blade. The server market has witnessed noticeable transition in technology and there are a number of players in the market focussed on providing servers with quality performance.

Industry experts feel that the racks will continue to be the best accepted over all and blade will find place in mid range and large enterprises.

The shift from Tower to Rack

The changeover from tower servers to rack mounts can be attributed to a host of reasons. Space, power and the ability to connect with external SAN networks being one of them. Storage is virtualised to give access to systems on a need basis, availability of bandwidth, thereby enabling centralisation of IT infrastructure, manageability in a single location and cost of IT support, manpower and attrition rates.

Also, PSU banks going in for centralised core banking applications which run out of a central location on vertically scaling RISC/Unix based systems providing higher availability and reliability have contributed towards the dip in tower models.

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According to industry experts, there is not much of a difference is specs between a tower model and a rack mount server except the Height in RU (rack units). Tower models have more internal disk capacity (more internal disc bays), whereas rack mounts have generally 2 internal disks for OS mirroring. Tower models provide PCI based internal RAID controller, which is a single point of failure. In rack mounts, OS is mirrored across 2 internal disks using RAID 1+0 (OS mirroring capabilities); these models have much higher heat dissipation and power consumption metrics.

Blade specs are closer to rack mount servers except that blade servers are housed in a common chassis and power supplies are common for all the blade in a chassis. Most blade manufacturers have a common backplane for IO (first and second generation blades) and an internal proprietary switch for aggregating IO.

India – A maturing server market

According to IDC figures, from Apr ‘06 to March ‘07, the Indian x86 server market was close to 113000 units. Out of this, blade market was 6500 units ( x86 as well as non x86) out of which x86 based blade were 6250 units.

In the US and a few other mature markets, tower servers are almost nonexistent; but in India, tower still has its place due to an array of reasons. According to experts, the tower models are still used in emerging markets where bandwidth is a constraint and skilled labour is construed to be cheap. However, off late, tower models have done around just about 3000 units in an 113000 units x86 market.

“IT is maturing in the Indian market and enterprises are concentrating on consolidating their servers and thus buying blade to replace the present scenario. We can certainly see a change in trend in the server market, as people are ready to spend on their infrastructure unlike before. Thus the demand is growing and we see the mid range and large enterprises going for blade in the future,” said Rajesh Dharr, country manager, Industry Standard Servers, HP.

“The server market in India is growing and is expected to grow in the future. SUN entered the blade market in Nov-Dec ‘06 with the launch of the SB8000 and about a quarter later with the SB8400. Recently, Sun launched the SB6000 system, which is a 2 socket blade. With the choice of processors (Intel, AMD, UltraSparc), operating system (Windows,Linux, Solaris 10) and virtualisation technologies (VMware, Solaris Containers, LDOMs), Sun is ideally positioned to address the customer’s requirement for consolidation through virtualisation, ” said Arnab Roy, GM - Marketing, Sun Microsystems India.