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The Buzz About Blades

The BladeCenter design allows the company to target core business applications, not niche markets, on its platform. BladeCenter works with two-processor type systems and handles enterprise-class applications that require performance availability. These include Microsoft* Exchange, Lotus* Notes*/Domino*, Citrix and WebSphere*. Benck says a natural synergy exists between blade servers and Linux clusters. In fact, he says about 50 percent of shipments have been for Linux applications. BladeCenter currently supports Windows* 2000 and above, as well as Red Hat and SuSE Linux. Other OSs may be added in the future. The POWER-based blade will support Linux and AIX*.

Real-Life Use
Already, blade servers are popular among ISPs and ASPs, and for applications such as e-mail, Web hosting and domain-name serving. Those in the financial and life sciences industries have also expressed interest in blades.

The Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis is one such example. Researchers at the center have been involved in the Human Genome Project since its inception. They're also working to analyze DNA sequences in other organisms, including chimpanzees, fish, plants and disease-causing bacteria. All of the centers research is entered in the public GenBank database, which is available to genetic researchers worldwide. The center has purchased BladeCenter and begun testing.

Genome Center Senior Technical Manager Kelly Carpenter is banking on BladeCenter to provide more power, greater compute density and higher availability to cope with the centers ever-increasing workload. He believes pairing blades with Linux will help accelerate the centers genomic data acquisition and analysis.

"Basically, we're trying to get the highest compute power density per area of server rack volume," Carpenter explains. "We used to have a series of 1U computers with two-and in some cases four-Pentium 3s on them. Now, we have 28 Pentium 4 CPUs. We have a rack with 75 blades running 150 processors. We can stick more computers and faster computers in the same amount of rack space with blades. That will give us more computing horsepower, so we can handle our existing jobs faster and add new loads. For us, the move to BladeCenter was a no-brainer."

While blades have been criticized for cooling problems, Carpenter says he has had no problems with overheating. Benck wouldn't be surprised. He insists that heating and cooling aren't problems for BladeCenter. In fact, he says IBM has leveraged its power and packing know-how to overcome this challenge.

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