Standards will lift blade sales

There is increasing demand for blade servers, and interoperable hardware standards are likely to emerge to further expand the market, say analysts.

Currently manufacturers use a variety of backplanes to connect individual blades to a chassis. Indeed, they currently use their backplane implementations to differentiate their products from those of their competitors. This was highlighted in the recent announcement by Sun of its new blade servers.

These fit into the firm's new Intelligent Shelf chassis, which, the firm said, can accommodate a range of blade formats - just so long as they are Sun designs.

But analysts say that for buyers, interoperability will become far more important than specific advantages of any one interconnect design. "Blade servers are just another part of the low-end commodity server marketplace," said Adrian O'Connell of analyst company Gartner Group. "There is a great deal of potential in this market, but it is going to require standards."

O'Connell argued that Intel-based servers became popular because vendors collaborated and agreed on standards. "This made it easy for customers to choose. At the moment, it looks as though vendors of blades are trying to lock customers in to their [hardware, rather than use common standards]."

O'Connell said the development of new IT products typically goes through three stages, and this will probably also apply to blades. The first stage, which blades have now passed, is when a group of vendors identify a market and create the technology. In the case of blades, the pioneers included Ziatech, Sun and RLX Technologies.

"But these early vendors pushed hard on areas such as high rack density, and often specified component technologies that were unsuitable," he said.

"We are now at the second stage, where the mainstream vendors move into the market. The key thing here is that there is far less difference in terms of the technology used. For the most part the technologies are Intel-based. But [vendors] are squabbling over the physical design, and in particular the interconnect [between each blade and the chassis], as a point of differentiation."

O'Connell predicts the third stage for blades will not be reached until 2004 or even 2005 - when the vendors will work together on the standards needed to make the hardware a commodity product. It will be at this stage that blade sales really take off, said O'Connell. For now, sales volumes are still relatively small, and there is no clear leader among the vendors.

"The [lower demand at present] is because of the lack of standards and the risk of lock in," O'Connell commented. "Blades are a hard choice for users right now, because they have to decide which vendor to use, and work out how many servers they need now, and how many they might need in the future." In such a situation the wrong decision could leave a buyer with a hardware architecture that will soon become obsolete.

There are already some reference designs for possible future standards. They include designs developed jointly by IBM and Intel. Another contender is likely to be a development of CompactPCI, which is already used by HP to yield greater rack density. An announcement on this development is expected before 2004.

"I think that we will see vendors agreeing on a set of hardware standards for blades by the end of this year," O'Connell said. "Then the vendors will be free to focus on the development of the essential management tools that large blade racks will need. This is probably the most important aspect of blades and I feel it will be the vendors with the experience of managing large systems that will end up as leaders in the blade marketplace."

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