Blade Servers: Beyond the Cutting Edge

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The blades render 3-D characters or whole scenes into 2-D images for the screen.

FAST FEEDBACK.

"Having lots of processors helps get our work turned around quickly," says Milton Ngan, Weta's chief technology officer. "This helps us get feedback on the work more quickly, and the work can be incrementally improved." While incremental improvement may not sound very exciting, it's what produces the realism -- and the thrills -- in movie special effects.

The same kind of computing power, in smaller doses, is available to run much simpler applications. Anaconda Sports, an upstate New York manufacturer and retailer of athletic equipment and uniforms for schools, uses blades to run its e-commerce Web site. The 200-person company formerly ran the Web site with conventional servers but found that it had frequent crashes that temporarily put it out of business.

"We thought blades were for big corporations," says Rob Meyer, Anaconda's director of Internet services. "We thought it was way out of our league. But the cost is right, and the performance is outstanding."

The Texas credit union example provides crisp cost and space comparisons. The company was running out of floor space in its crowded headquarters building in San Antonio. Yet it kept adding pizza-box-size Windows and Linux servers. Now it packs 14 blade servers in the space taken up by two conventional servers. At the same time, it reduced the cost of buying new gear by 30%, according to Pat Tolle, the credit union's vice-president for information technology.

ALL-PURPOSE.

The blade idea was an outgrowth of the dot-com boom. Internet startups and giant corporations alike were farming out their Web chores to companies that specialized in operating huge data centers. A handful of startups were the first to use blades, but they faded along with the dot-coms. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Compaq, before their merger, were the first tech giants to enter the fray, in 2000 and 2001.

IBM was a little late to the market, but its early revelation that blades could become a nearly all-purpose technology helps explain why Big Blue is now the market-share leader. It captured 37.2% share of blade shipments in the third quarter and a 45.1% share of revenues, according to Gartner. HP is in second place, and Dell (DELL) trails far behind (see BW Online, 9/2/04, "Is 'IBMtel' the Next Winning Combo?").

Back in 2001, deep in the bowels of IBM, a band of 30 people operating under the code name Excalibur spent months talking to customers about how they might use blades. They concluded that the technology could be used to handle a vast array of computing jobs, and they saw the opportunity to package the blades in a way that gave them some of the dependability and resilience of huge mainframes. "While others were thinking of blades as power- and space-saving, we had a very different concept," says Tim Dougherty, who has been IBM's director of blade marketing since mid-2001.

CLASHING SWORDS.

The higher-ups at IBM spotted the blade concept as a comer and blessed the project with the status of an official emerging business opportunity -- which brought a big investment in money and engineers. When IBM's first blades debuted in 2002, they took off.

IBM's latest gambit is to prepackage blades on chassis for particular industries. It offers a half-dozen of these, including one for branch banking, called "bank in a box." That one packs network servers, an e-mail server, video surveillance, and other functions into a single chassis. Early next year, IBM plans on following up with a retail-store package.

The battle for blade supremacy is far from over, however. HP claims to have a superior package of software for managing blade servers and associated storage devices. It also touts its technology for power supplies and cooling. "We're a strong contender to IBM. You'll see us overtake them in time," says Rick Becker vice-president and general manager for the HP Blade System product line.

IDC analyst Humphrey says IBM will have to stay on its game to hold the lead. "I see the blade space today as a very active battle between two industry heavyweights," he says. Kind of like King Kong vs. Godzilla.

Hamm is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.