{"id":9785,"date":"2009-07-21T17:11:00","date_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9785"},"modified":"2009-07-21T17:11:00","modified_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","slug":"power-utilisation-comparison-of-rack-vs-blade-servers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9785","title":{"rendered":"Power Utilisation Comparison Of Rack VS Blade Servers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This <a title=\"blog post\" href=\"http:\/\/dcsblog.burtongroup.com\/data_center_strategies\/2009\/07\/power-efficiency-rack-mount-vs-blade-servers.html\">blog post<\/a> by Data Center Strategies reports on a publication by HP.\u00a0 HP compared the power usage of DL rack mounted servers and BL Blade servers.\u00a0 It was \u2026 interesting.\u00a0 When idle, the blades used significantly less power.\u00a0 But when busy, there was little in the way of difference.<\/p>\n<p>So \u2026<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If you are building a small to medium power intensive server farm you might be tempted to go with rack servers instead of blades.\u00a0 There\u2019s a big cost saving to be made.\u00a0 Server prices have increased over the last year to compensate for the lack of sales \u2026 we need less physical boxes because we are virtualising.\u00a0 Server capacity is up, though.<\/li>\n<li>Blades do have some nice features.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot less cabling and hardware virtualisation enables boot from SAN that turns your physical servers into anonymous replaceable appliances.\u00a0 All the intelligence is in the chassis and all the OS\/data is on the SAN.<\/li>\n<li>As committed to blades\/SAN as we are at work, there\u2019s still times where we\u2019ve found DL rack servers to be more appropriate, functionally and cost wise.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I\u2019ve not looked at the cost of the C3000 \u201cShorty\u201d.\u00a0 There\u2019s some cool stuff you can now do with their Flex-10 10GB networking that enables you to use the C3000 for virtualisation.\u00a0 The C3000 has 8 slots for server, tape and storage blades.\u00a0 The problem with the Shorty blades is that they only take one mezzanine card.\u00a0 That means you can\u2019t do complex virtualisation clusters that could require 6 NIC\u2019s or more per server.\u00a0 With Flex-10 you get 10GB networking in the backplane.\u00a0 You can divide that up and create virtual NIC\u2019s on your blades.\u00a0 Potentially (don\u2019t ask me about support for this because I don\u2019t know) you could have 8 NIC\u2019s per blade for virtualisation \u2026 2 for the parent partition, 2 for the heartbeat, 2 for VMotion\/Live Migration and 2 for the virtual switches.\u00a0 This could be fine in small deployments, e.g. a branch office.\u00a0 AFAIK, you could then use iSCSI to mount the shared storage for VMFS\/CSV.<\/p>\n<p>But you know, <em>now<\/em> if I was building a virtual server farm now with a traditional known growth limit (not like in hosting where the growth is hopefully endless) then I\u2019d go with normal rack servers.\u00a0 There\u2019s a big investment in a blade chassis that is hard to justify now.\u00a0 On the HP storage side the Lefthand iSCSI stuff looks very tempting for DR implementations.\u00a0 It is pricey but it would make DR very easy.<\/p>\n<p>EDIT #1<\/p>\n<p>As exected, HP&#8217;s marketing was not very happy with this report.\u00a0 Some <a href=\"http:\/\/dcsblog.burtongroup.com\/data_center_strategies\/2009\/08\/benchmark-troubles---specpower.html\" target=\"_blank\">investigations<\/a> were done and it turns out the rack server configurations weren&#8217;t on par with the blade comparisons.\u00a0 The rack servers only has one power supply and had redundant NIC&#8217;s disabled.\u00a0 Anything that could be done to reduce power consumption was done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This blog post by Data Center Strategies reports on a publication by HP.\u00a0 HP compared the power usage of DL rack mounted servers and BL Blade servers.\u00a0 It was \u2026 interesting.\u00a0 When idle, the blades used significantly less power.\u00a0 But when busy, there was little in the way of difference. So \u2026 If you are &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=9785\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Power Utilisation Comparison Of Rack VS Blade Servers&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}