Blade Servers

[mot98]

Hi All,

Our company is currently looking at starting to use Blade Servers to help with our Space/Cooling issues in our Server Room.

We are a 90% Dell shop, however we are discussing the possibility of moving to HP Blades, due to the fact that they are better proven.

Does anyone have any experience between the two?



mot98

"Is it friday yet?"

 

[kjkreu]

Looking at HP blades are a better choice then the Dell blades. However I would not ignore looking at IBM blades as well. Both IBM and HP do alot of engineering into there products.

IBM is typically more energy efficient the HP or Dell blades. However, it all depends on what your configuration will be. HP's new c-Class has improved their chassis design, but if you go with the 16 blades in a chassis you then go with a single point of failure like the older HP chassis or Dell chassis for power and I/O.

As long as you and your company keep an open mind between Dell, HP or IBM with the goals you have which is currently rack space and power efficiencies(and more likely others like TCO, future growth and backward compatability) you can be proud in the fact that you did your due diligence.

kjkreu

 

[lhuegele]

We have been nothing but 100% satisfied with our Dell blade servers! Haven't used the others though.

 

[johnny99]

We have around 50-60 blade servers. They are ok.
I would also go after IBM og HP if I didn't need to look at the "big picture" in our shop.

One thing about cooling.

Bladeservers tend to be more difficult to coole then normal servers due to the fact that you generate much more energy per rack that you need to get rid of.
A fully loaded rack with bladeservers can generate up to 40Kw heat.

/johnny