July 30, 2003, 9:29 AM — Two years after vendors began introducing slimmed down "blade" computers as the next stage in the evolution of the server, these denser, more power-efficient servers have been struggling to meet market expectations and prove that they have what it takes to emerge as an industry standard.
In fact, the last couple of years have been downright rocky for blades. The dot-com-fuelled Web serving market they were first aimed at has shrunk, and the IT market in general has grown much more conservative in its approach toward new technology.
Still, as far as analysts and blade vendors are concerned, the question is not whether these new servers will take off, but when.
Their confidence is understandable, because in principle, the blade concept makes a great deal of sense. The idea is to strip down the servers in a server farm to their bare essentials: removing the CD-ROM, video processor, and keyboard connection and having the power and cooling supplied by a separate enclosure, so that the blade servers can be slid in and out of specialized enclosures like books in a bookshelf.
In theory, you have servers that are less expensive to produce, take up less space, and require less power.
In reality, you have a brand new architecture with benefits that have been harder to prove in practice.
This is why blade sales have fallen short of analyst expectations. In 2001, IDC predicted that 67,000 of the slimmed-down servers would be sold the following year, creating a US$148 million market. The industry research firm was bullish about blade growth, forecasting sales of $4.5 billion by 2005.
By the time 2002 was over, however, vendors shipped 40 percent fewer blades than IDC had expected, and tallied just $100 million in sales, almost $50 million less than expected.
IDC has now nearly halved its 2005 sales prediction to $2.5 billion, and some of the early start-ups that had hoped to cash in on the move to blades have felt the pinch. FiberCycle Networks Inc., an early company created to sell low power blade servers quickly went out of business. Rival blade pioneer RLX Technologies Inc. has laid off staff and replaced senior executives.
"I don't think the vendors have made a compelling argument of what these things are good for," said Gartner Inc. analyst John Enck, who says that despite the blade vendors' best efforts to promote the blade concept as a simple step beyond rack-mounted computing, these new servers have yet to be accepted as general purpose machines.
One problem is pricing, Enck said. While blade systems have a price performance advantage when they are deployed in large systems, their costs are too high in configurations of less than 10 servers, he said. "These things are just too expensive," he observed. "There's no reason for blades to be premium priced, other than (the vendors) can get away with it."
Analysts also say that the complexity of blade computing -- with few standards in the areas of backplanes, management software, or even blade form factors -- is holding it back.
Not all users agree with the analysts, however.
"That's typical analyst stuff," said John Knuff, the vice president of network engineering with New York-based financial trading systems company NYFIX Inc. "I've never seen any new technology come out that didn't have a steep learning curve. It takes you a few months or a year to be good at it, just like anything else."
NYFIX is using blades to host high availability servers in its data centers that are running securities transactions, and Knuff is happy enough with the blade return on investment that he's planning use some more. "We're also going to use them for market data servers and we're starting to convert some of our existing Solaris applications to Linux and blade platforms."
Blades can be expensive, Knuff conceded. "If you've got inexpensive data center space, the blade server will cost you more than a regular server, as far as cost per rack," he said. But as the number of servers in play goes up, the economics of blade computing become more attractive. "When you're going to have 20 to 50 to hundreds of servers, then it's going to start to make sense," he said. "I think it's going to replace the 1U (1.75-inch-thick rack-mounted) server market, where people have one specific role for six or more servers," he said.
Others are less enthusiastic.
"We don't see anything really compelling about blades," said David Moffitt, the director of engineering at health care information technology company McKesson Corp. "The kind of environment that looks good for blades is when you have a lot of similar Web presentations that you need to expand and contract fairly rapidly."
