Blade Servers: Beyond the Cutting Edge

Once used only for megacomputing functions, these compact powerhouses are now being designed and sold to all manner of businesses

by Steve Hamm

When moviegoers face the huge, superrealistic mug of an entirely digital King Kong in multiplexes in the coming weeks, they'll have one of the hottest technologies in computerdom to thank for the hair-raising experience. At the other end of the computing spectrum, Air Force personnel who do their banking with Randolph Brooks Federal Credit Union in San Antonio, Tex., benefit from the same technology.

That's the magic of blade servers. Originally conceived as a niche product for huge computing centers, these slim servers-on-a-rack have become the Swiss army knife of modern computing. They're being put to use in everything from supercomputers that generate 3-D imagery for movies to Web sites and corporate data centers to soup-to-nuts computing setups in midsize businesses.

They're even serving as replacements for desktop computers. A dozen people can tap into a single blade server that's carved up into virtual PCs. Blades are "for the broadest set of customers," says analyst John Humphreys of tech-market researcher IDC. "The blade platform isn't just a solution for the biggest and baddest data center operators."

DISRUPTIVE TECH.

That explains why blades are fast becoming the force to reckon with in the computer hardware industry. IDC expects blade revenues to almost double this year, from $1.2 billion last year. And they're poised to grow to $10 billion in 2009. If this forecast comes to pass, that will mean blades will leap from being just 2% of server revenue and 5% of server units sold in 2004 to 15% of revenues and 25% of units four years from now. That would also be the fastest-ever growth for any type of computer.

Blades are an incredibly disruptive technology, replacing much larger and more expensive computers. They're part of the shift to off-the-shelf commodity servers, since most of them run on standard Intel (INTC) or AMD (AMD) microprocessors and on the Windows or Linux operating systems.

At the same time, blades give tech suppliers plenty of opportunity to innovate. Packaged the way they are, it's easier to manage them to simplify computing tasks, recover quickly from meltdowns, and shift processing jobs from one server to another when need be. That combination of high innovation at low cost is hard to beat (see BW, 3/22/04, "Servers: More Bells and Whistles, Please").

CHANGEABLE BLADES.

What the industry has seen so far is just the start. Doug Balog, vice-president of IBM's (IBM) blade center business unit, says the Cell multimedia processor, initially developed for Sony's (SNE) upcoming PlayStation 3 video-game console, will soon be put to work on blades for jobs such as medical imaging. And such superdemanding processing tasks will require just a handful of blades, not a supercomputer. "This is not that far off," says Balog (see BW, 6/20/05, "A Virtual Revolution").

Blade servers are essentially circuit boards, about 12 inches tall by 14 inches deep, that are placed vertically in metal chassis, which are stacked in racks. They share power and cooling capabilities. When a blade goes bad, it can easily be pulled out and replaced with another. There's a joke going around in computing circles that the ultimate data center would be one filled with blades in racks, staffed by one technician and one dog. The techie would be there to replace blades that go bad, and the dog would be there to bite him if he tried to do anything else.

Right now, King Kong is the coolest use of blades by far. Weta Digital, a New Zealand special-effects company that gained fame for its part in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, recently put the finishing touches on Kong. Its 1,900 blade servers produce so much computing power that they rank as the world's 109th-fastest supercomputer.