Blade servers: The fine print matters

The category of blade servers has matured so quickly that the major blade makers -- IBM, HP, Dell, RLX -- are finding little room for differentiation. For the most part, they're all singing the same tune: blades offer more servers per square inch, save power, wipe out cabling nests, make for great server consolidation targets, and are easier to manage because of centralised management tools. Blade vendors also like to talk about how blades can help facilitate the on-demand dream since they offer re-provisioning flexibility of idyllic proportions.

In fact, so nuanced are the innovations in the blade space that you have to read the fine print to understand where the innovations lie, who's ahead, and who's behind.

I was reminded of this during a recent news briefing with Douglas Erwin, chief executive of RLX , the company that invented the category and is now "the little blade company that could" -- could get bought or squashed, that is. RLX is looking to win the hearts and minds of blade buyers who have IBM, HP and perhaps Dell on their short lists. (Though it has a blade offering, Dell has been relatively quiet on the blade front lately.) Erwin claims that even though IBM and HP dominate the market, RLX's constant pushing of the blade innovation envelope means that you could be selling yourself short by opting for the bigger but slower movers.

Indeed, RLX reminds me of Sequent and Tandem and, to a lesser extent, ALR -- three companies that during the 1990s catered to buyers seeking higher performance and more availability from their servers. At the time, all three companies offered something that we would eventually expect from an average tier one server offering, and all three were eventually swallowed by those tier one competitors. Looking at RLX's self-proclaimed innovations, I can't help but think that the big guns won't be far behind. Everything RLX claims to be doing differently is as much common sense as it was for Sequent, Tandem, or ALR salespeople to ask if you'd like parallel processing or fault tolerance with your server.

For example, RLX claims that its main differentiator is the newly released version 6G of Control Tower, its server management product. RLX's primary point of attack against IBM and HP has been the fact that each company's management solutions are cobbled together from multiple products (IBM's Tivoli/Director, HP's Insight Manager/Altiris' provisioning tools).

While HP and IBM admit to the componentised nature of their total solutions, each downplays any resulting inconveniences to systems administrators. In contrast, Dell spokesperson Wendy Giever says that manageability is currently the chief inhibitor to blade acceptance -- but not in the way you might think. Referring to a standard-sized, rack-mountable server, Giever said: "Many customers are still sticking with their 1U designs, which means they aren't as interested in the density that blades have to offer. But when you probe deeper, you learn that what they don't want is any additional layers of management beyond what they already have in place. Unfortunately, even if you can add blades to your existing server management solution, you still have to manage the enclosures, which is that extra layer that no one wants."