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Whats the average cost savings of switching over to blade servers?
My company is considering switching from our rack servers to blade servers. On average, how much money did your company save by using blade servers? And which brand do you use?
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3 Answers
I'm not sure that you are guaranteed any cost savings with blade servers.
I think it all comes down to power and cooling, and staff efficiencies. Rack servers don't care if you use 10A, 20A, or 30A circuits at either 120V or 208V. Most blade systems want 2 x 208V x 30A circuits. If you are in a co-lo situation, you can be charged significantly more for 208V circuits. Also, given the density and heat, you can't always put as many blade chassis in a single rack as you could fit 1U servers, so you may have to have more spatial real estate to fit the same cooling profile with blades.
The key advantage to blades is that you can have a single management interface and consistent ways to remap and repurpose hardware. If you already have this part figured out well with 1U servers, then you probably won't get a ton of benefits from blades.
I've used both the Dell and HP blade solutions, and thought the HP solution had better components and was easier to use.
Blade center cost savings are all long-term projections. Most companies don't ever calculate them unless they're an enterprise -- and even then because of red tape the IT is likely barred from using them to their full potential.
Armed with that, I've used Dell, HP, and IBM.
In my opinion IBM is hands down the best product out there. The interface requires virtually no training and is the quickest out of the box solution to get up and going.
Where blade center technology works the best is in clouds with shared hardware resources, and Citrix. If you have a huge Citrix deployment with a lot of published desktops you can consolidate them into a single rack rather than 10 racks
Listed below you will find a link that HP put together which includes calculators, TCO power sizers etc.. Send me an email offline and I will be able to assist with additional information. I would need to get a better understanding of your current infrastructure along with future growth needs and application mgmt etc...
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/316661-0-0-0-121.html
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