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Displaying articles for: 11-23-2008 - 11-29-2008
Why Blades? Less wires.
There are a lot of reasons to move to blades and we love to include most, if not all in our typical sales pitch. Power, cooling, space, money, time, flexiblity, yada, yada, yada. But today, I just want to talk about one aspect of Why Blades: Less wires (or 'dramatic cable consolidation' in IT marketing speak)
You probably don't think about wires very often. They're pretty boring. They're pretty common. They're also a pretty big pain in the butt. Watch these videoes and you'll see what I mean.
Sometimes you have to take step back and see something like this to recognize that even small improvements can make a really big difference in your day to day life.
HP blade cut cables up to 94%. That's comparining all the power, network, SAN and management cables you need for 42 typical rack servers versus blade servers. Add something like Virtual Connect to that equation, and you can save several administrators a ton of time in having to deal with moving servers or their LAN and SAN connections. Plus you can add another 4 to 1 consolidation on switches, NICs and core switch ports with Virtual Connect Flex-10.
Do you realize that once your BladeSystem is wired, you many never have to touch a cable again until you decide to take it offline someday? We tell customers all the time, if you're using blades and go with patch panels instead of Virtual Connect or blade switches, you're missing out on one of the biggest advantages of going with blades.
Here's my quick list of why we hate wires:
They cost a lot of money. Long Ethernet cables are pretty expensive, especially multiplied by 100's or 1000's. Don't even get me started on Fibre Channel cables.
Wires connect to other things that cost even more money. Have you checked Cisco's 10Gb core switch prices on a per port basis? Ouch.
Every wire is a potential point of failure. This was really brought home for us the other day when a customer talked about how they eliminated something like 20,000 cables by going to blades. He said, "I don't even know how to start calculating the improvement in 'mean time between failures' (MTBF) of that!!!"
Moving one server means moving a bunch of wires, a bunch of reconfiguring and bunch of time of your other colleagues on the LAN and SAN side. Sometimes it even means moving the wires of other servers you don't want to mess with.
How many hours a year do you figure you spend installing, troubleshooting and untangling wires? Don't you have something better to do? Like checking out the latest on the HP blade blog?
Do you have a cable nightmare story or picture to share? How about a major cable improvement since you moved to blades. Share!
