Bladeserver

A blade server, and server blade or short blade (English " leaf ", " blade " ), is an assembly which, together with a battery of the same not -alone computer. Blades are used in vendor-specific rack and use the built- in power supplies together.

Construction

The racks are called depending on the manufacturer, for example, BladeCenter or blade enclosure and are usually intended for 19 -inch racks. The blades are inserted into so-called slots and are then automatically connected to the backplane of the rack.

Architecture

Blades usually have only their own motherboard with microprocessors, memory and none, one or two hard drives, which are designed for the operating system. If more disk space is required, this can be either through an adapter in the BladeCenter (SAN, NAS) or on an expansion module with hard drives, which, however, itself requires a slot in the BladeCenter be created.

So the blades use the same resources are centrally managed and have a common power supply and ventilation. For example, a standard 42U 19 "rack holds up to 84 blades and contain up to 5376 processor cores.

A blade system, a term of HP, is the fact tethered blades needed by these hardware infrastructure fully available. The special feature is that the server do not have fans in the blades, but the fans are installed redundantly on the back of the housing. Thus there is no heat fields. The patented fan design is originally from the aircraft technology.

A BladeCenter, a label from IBM, is the fact tethered blades needed by this infrastructure. In addition to the power, inter alia, include optical drives, network switches and Fibre Channel switches ( for storage connection). This infrastructure is coupled to one or two ( redundant for the purpose of fault tolerance ) backplanes ( midplane ).

Software

More than 50 % of all blades should, according to the IDC market research run on Linux, and this with a current growth rate of over 100 % per year in this sector.

Benefits

The advantage of the blades is the compact design, high power density, scalability and flexibility, and the ease of wiring with much less expenditure of cables and quick and easy maintenance. In addition, only a single graphic keyboard mouse controller for the rack is needed.

The risk of damage caused by fan failure is reduced because the fans are redundant housed in the rack.

Disadvantages

Due to the high power density in a small space, the planning of the power consumption and the heat dissipation is not trivial. Due to the compact design, maintenance on the hardware are sometimes a bit more expensive than traditional servers.

Manufacturer

Since 2007, HP is not only the market leader in Europe, but also worldwide. For the first quarter of 2011, HP had a market share of almost 50 %, followed by IBM with 20 % and Cisco with 10 %. Other manufacturers are Dell, Fujitsu Technology Solutions, Supermicro, Hitachi Data Systems and Oracle.