The Best of Blade Technologies

When you get a room full of analysts together, the conversation often turns interesting and that is exactly what happened during a monthly meeting in Rye Brook, NY. The topic was "blades" and the question was "What are the five most innovative blade technologies today?" Obviously there was a heated discussion with much disagreement. When the dust finally settled, we had our five winners. This is not a scientific study, but rather the options of a group of IDEAS analysts. Our storage analyst added that we may see some interesting bladed storage technologies in the near future, but that’s a topic for another blog. In no particular order, here is our list of the five best blade technologies available today:

1. Egenera PAN Architecture – Imagine a blade architecture that brings the flexibility of a SAN to a blade server architecture. That’s the concept behind Egenera’s Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture. All Egenera blades are stateless and diskless and the PAN Manager software creates pools of resources that can be dynamically modified. The Egenera PAN architecture is the only fully virtualized computing architecture with integrated high availability. It’s elegant, it works, and it’s available today.

2. HP Virtual Connect – What a great concept! Virtualize the connections between a blade server, the network, and storage resources. The system is wired once and can be changed on the fly as often as needed. A failed blade can be replaced in minutes, all without having to disturb the LAN or SAN addresses. Why can’t all blade servers be this simple?

3. IBM Cell BE Blade – The QS20 blade contains two of IBM’s very unique Cell BE processors and delivers a stunning 410 GFLOPS of performance per board. Imagine a full rack of these blades tearing through a high performance computing application! Because it is a challenging architecture for software developers, Cell blades have a lot of potential but not many real world applications today. But when those applications finally arrive, this blade will be incredible.

4. Intel Xeon Quad-Core L5300 Series Low Voltage Processors – If you could start with a clean slate and design the perfect processor for blade servers, this would be the processor. Based on Intel’s CORE architecture, the quad-core L5300 series delivers breathtaking performance, while keeping everything quite cool with its 50W heat output. It’s the perfect processor for blades.

5. PC Blades – Designed and sold by many companies such as IBM, HP, Ardence, Sun, and ClearCube, the PC blade delivers full PC functionality to a thin client desktop from a centralized location. Thin client desktop computing offers higher availability, improved security, lower management costs, and potentially better environmental characteristics. Recent government privacy regulations and the drive for ‘green computing’ have fueled new interest in this technology.

There you have it. We congratulate all of the winners and console those whose products did not make the list. Better luck next time. We can guarantee you that this will not be the last "Top 5" list. If you disagree with our choices, please let us know.