PowerEdge illuminated
Dell has been cagey about its coming blade design, revealing only that it plans an aggressively low price and that about 50 percent more Dell servers will fit into a rack.
But details are emerging.
Each blade will have a USB port in front for management purposes and dual SCSI hard drives that can be replaced from the front without shutting down the system, according to one source.
Those details are among the similarities in size and construction between the PowerEdge 1855 and Fujitsu's Primergy BX600 blade servers.
The systems' chassis look the same, down to screw placement and bezel widths. But the blades themselves have at least one difference: the chipset. Dell says its blades use an Intel chipset, whereas the current Fujitsu system uses a ServerWorks chipset from Broadcom.
Where does the similarity come from? Fujitsu and Dell don't have a blade partnership, says Jon Rodriguez, Primergy's senior product manager. Analysts speculated that it's possible both computer makers relied on the same third-party source. A host of design companies, many in Taiwan, develop laptops, servers and other products that eventually sport a better-known company's brand name.
"They may very well take an offering from a third-party contract manufacturer that designed 80 percent and allowed customisation," Ryder says.
And Fujitsu allowed that a significant amount of its blade servers could come from elsewhere. "Usually we don't talk about where [our designs] come from," Rodriguez says. "There's a significant amount of [Fujitsu] intellectual property in our blade server design."
Gartner analyst John Enck says Dell is eating competitors' lunch in the low end of the server market.
Fujitsu plans to release a new blade soon that will use Intel's Nocona version of Xeon, Rodriguez says. It would probably use the Intel chipset, like the rest of Fujitsu's Nocona servers.
IBM plays it cool
IBM says it doubts Dell has the engineering ability to make good blades, the dense configurations of which make them more susceptible to overheating problems. "They're not going to have the skills to do the development," says Jeff Benck, vice president of Big Blue's blade unit.
IBM has taken measures to defend its blade server lead, introducing a lower-price version of its BladeCenter and new small SCSI hard drives that now mean 14 blades will fit in a chassis the same height as Dell's. "We don't think they'll win anything over us," Benck says.
But Dell says its designs will address 90 percent of the blade market, and it has succeeded in carving lower-end server market share from competitors. "Dell is eating their lunch in the one-way and two-way market," says Gartner analyst John Enck.
Blades do present new hurdles for Dell, though. "I think their biggest weakness is in the software stack. If you look at what IBM is fielding for a software stack around its blades, or what HP is fielding, it's pretty powerful stuff. Dell is going to be seriously challenged to provide that," Enck says.
