September 9, 2004

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Principal Analyst, Nemertes Research

Last week’s announcement by IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Intel Corp (NASD:INTC) that they would release the specifications for blade servers on a royalty-free basis highlights the trend of commoditization of the blade-server market.

A key component of the flexible data center are blade systems, which consist of a rack-mounted chassis with several identical slots and the blade servers themselves, which are computers on a thin circuit board that can be plugged into the slots. The chassis provides networking, power and management, and is hot-pluggable, which allows administrators to pull out a blade and replace it without powering down the system. Blade systems can pack a lot of computing power in a very small space – e.g. 84 servers in a rack. Data center managers can take advantage of these high-density servers to grow their data centers on demand.

Blade servers can reduce operational costs by simplifying deployment and management and providing a flexible platform for application provisioning. However, blade servers are currently based on proprietary hardware and management software which makes them costlier to deploy and manage and forces data center managers to pick a single vendor.

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