Top vendors sharpen up blade units

Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and IBM are launching new high-performance blade servers.

Blades are modular, rack-mounted servers, designed to fit more power into a smaller space, and have become increasingly popular in datacentres.

Sun's Simon Tindall said, "One of the drivers behind blade systems is getting server density as high as possible. [But] there is a trade-off between the performance of the server, power consumption and heat dissipation."

HP last week launched the first dual-processor blade-format server. Other vendors, including IBM and Fujitsu Siemens, are expected to unveil similar models later this year.

Later this year, Sun will launch a new range of blade servers branded under the Sun Microsystems name. Some will be based on the x86 architecture and will run Linux, while others will use the UltraSparc chip and Sun's Solaris Unix operating system.

Sun has previously manufactured UltraSparc-based blade servers for the telecoms industry.

Some observers are sceptical about the advantage of fitting two Intel chips into blade designs, arguing that it may increase the heat produced by each dual-processor blade server to a level equivalent to that generated by two single-chip blades.

Even so, Tindall predicted that dual-chip designs will become increasingly popular. "All vendors will probably market single- and dual-processor blade systems," he said.

Tindall added that there are a number of sectors, including the financial markets and in the pharmaceutical industry, where "the key requirement is to have [multiple] medium-power processors that do not produce a great deal of heat".