STORAGE & SERVERS/BLADES
What are the storage blades and when might they be a good choice?
Nowadays, we discover customers turning to blade servers to reap the economics of denser and a lot of optimally designed solutions. In general, blades hit the sweet spot between standard, commercial, off-the-rack servers, and therefore, the extreme version of optimized rack servers that you just may notice at Google. Since enterprises cannot customize their own hardware and software to the degree that Google will, blades offer them higher density, performance and power, and cooling than typical business off-the-shelf rack servers.
How do storage blade solutions work with server and storage virtualization technologies
It varies. Ultimately, once you address one thing like blade storage, you are stepping back to direct-attached storage. And you are abandoning plenty of options. That is why we tend to see very high attach rates with server virtualization customers, like eighty-fifth attach rates to a SAN [storage-area network] from customers that adopt server virtualization. That being stated, there are some nice innovative solutions out there that deliver shared storage, like Verari [Systems INC.’s] Open-E stuff or HP’s All-in-One stuff.
