Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs Review

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Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs ReviewIt doesn't take very long to figure out that the authors really like blade servers.
They like their space savings, cable plant simplicity, and uniformity. There are very detailed (although never critical) descriptions of each manufacturer's product lines and some very exhaustive matrices comparing not only blade servers but virtualization products as well.
My problems are in the details. First of all, it is clear that in many cases the benefits being credited to blade servers accrue ONLY because those blade servers are running virtualization products. Moreover, in many cases it is unclear why the benefits would not have accrued to commodity scale out servers running virtualization products.
Two, there are some claims that just stretch credulity too far. For instance, it is claimed that a provisioning a new blade server can be done in a few hours while doing the same with a rack mount server can take weeks.
Bearing in mind that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all constructed their massive data centers with rack mount servers, you have to wonder how they could have made the same mistake (from the author's point of view) several hundred thousand times for each vendor.
The fact of the matter is that blades are a perfect choice for certain data center environments, but not others. Today they constitute ~ 15 % of all server shipments and most vendors hope to get that up to ~20% by 2010.
What's the hold up? Well, blade servers cost more per unit of computing power. Their form factors are proprietary, so their is considerable vendor lock-in (and thus higher prices). And the switches built for each blade center are vastly more expensive and slower to adopt new features than standalone modular or fixed form factor switches.
Conversely, virtualization is a wonderful add-on for certain types of compute applications, but not all. (For the technically inclined, if compute latency is at a premium, or the computations requires large amounts of state to be held in memory, then virtualization is going to be at best a mixed blessing and quite possibly make things worse.) Such limitations are alluded to peripherally, but never spoken to head on.
That's a darn shame. Had the authors included a chapter on when blades make sense and when virtualization makes sense, this would have easily been a 5 star book for me. The writing style is lucid and flows well. The authors are clearly experienced in their field. However, the assertion that blades and virtualization are a broad based panacea for most types of organizations and data centers just does not conform to the facts.Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs Overview
Blade server systems and virtualization are key building blocks for Next Generation Enterprise Data centers
Blades offer modular, pre-wired, ultra high-density servers (up to 10x traditional servers) with shared components (power, cooling, switches) – reducing complexity and cost, and improving flexibility, availability, manageability, and maintainability
Virtualization enables consolidation of physical servers by allowing many virtual servers to run concurrently on one physical server – improving system utilization, reducing the total number of physical servers, reducing costs, and increasing flexibility
This is the first book covering these complementary technologies and how, together, they provide a strong foundation for the future
It examines the history, architectures, features, examples, and user case studies of blade systems and virtualization, and offers guidance and considerations for how to evaluate and implement solutions


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