Blades at center of data center action

The momentum behind blade servers continues to build. IDC says blade server shipments in 2007 grew by more than 35%, while the overall server market increased by only 2.4%. And the $1 billion venture capitalists have invested into blade companies of late is resulting in a plethora of products hitting the market now and in the months to come.

So, it's no surprise that today in New York the Blade.org Technology Symposium 2008 will make its debut. Blade.org is an industry consortium backed by Intel, IBM and other heavyweights and includes user companies like MetLife and CBS Television as well.

For blade advocates like Doug Balog, chairman of Blade.org and the vice president of blade technology at IBM, the compact computers are more than mere servers and deserve their own conference, something the world never saw with pizza box or tower servers.

To him and others, blades are the loci of systems convergence and integration for the next generation data center. First, you can pack more blades into a standard server rack, more than doubling your computer performance for the same data center real estate. (Power issues need to be thought through, of course.) But it's the shared resources that make blades unique. The converged network fabric they share, in particular, is where the action is in the near term.

Balog says in early 2009 he expects to see blade systems with adapters running both fibre channel and Ethernet protocols, giving more flexibility to IT for configuring their SAN and server resources in a blade environment than with standard rack-based servers.

He suggests that when that happens not only will CIOs be able to make better deals on network gear, ultimately network management tools will converge and the skill sets people need to use them will converge, as it were, as well, making more efficient, less costly systems management possible.

We'll see.