[LINK] Blade servers solve space dilemma
Bernard Robertson-Dunn
brd at iimetro.com.au
Wed Feb 11 10:29:59 AEDT 2009
<brd>
10-12% improvement in space utilisation with blades I can believe.
Tom's factor of 100 I find difficult to take seriously, even with
virtualisation and application optimisation.
</brd>
Blade servers solve space dilemma
Andrew Colley
February 10, 2009
The Australian IT
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,25029197-24169,00.html
GROWTH can be a two-edged sword for data centre operators. New customers
bring more revenue but they may also require an expensive lease on new
floor space.
That was the dilemma facing Leighton Holdings' data centre business,
Infoplex, early last year. Last March Infoplex faced taking a new lease
on hosting centre space to sustain a fleet of servers and routers that
was rapidly growing towards 1200 devices.
Infoplex general manager Scott Crane said that was an expensive prospect
before the global financial crisis.
"Data centre space is not cheap and until the start of the financial
crisis it was very hard to get. More has become available now, but it
was difficult to find places to put racks and storage," Mr Crane said.
Infoplex started testing new blade server equipment - including some
from incumbent supplier Dell - in a bid to extract more capacity from
its data centre.
It tried blade servers from a number of suppliers. The computing
performance of the equipment was comparable, but the new Dell blade
equipment delivered an unexpected energy rating bonus.
"Ironically, we got a 12-13 per cent power saving going to these
chassis. Not only have we saved space but ironically we've saved power.
We also have a denser computing environment over the same amount of
space," he said.
Between April and September the company changed more than 60-70 per cent
of its server hardware to the new blade equipment - about 600-700 servers.
Mr Crane said hosting centre usage improved 12 per cent after the
transition, enabling the company to hold off for 12-18 months on plans
to obtain new hosting centre real estate.
"Theoretically we would have bought more server space last March and
we're playing with that idea now, to be ready later this year," Crane said.
The migration process went smoothly, Mr Crane said. However, he
conceded, it was 26 per cent more expensive to lease the new blade
server equipment compared with the older infrastructure.
The increase in cost was more than offset by improvements in utilisation
and energy saving, he said.
"They're more expensive, but that is offset by savings on space and
power," he said.
However, it appears that at least some of the company's decision was
based on convenience.
Crane conceded equipment from other vendors may have been slightly more
advanced, but there were benefits from staying with Dell.
His staff were "comfortable" with the Dell infrastructure and changing
vendors would require additional costs, he said.
The company plans to continue migrating to new servers in coming months.
--
Regards
brd
Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au
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