Email the Editor    Email a Friend    Print this Page 

HP's new blade architecture also offers a 40 per cent reduction in power over traditional rack mounted servers, according to HP. One of the key contributors to the c-Class's energy savings is the redesigned HP Active Cool Fan, which cuts server airflow by 30 per cent and energy consumption by 50 per cent when compared to traditional fans. HP's Cooling Team, which is a company-wide effort made up of technologists who research how blades are powered and cooled, converted the technology from remote-controlled airplanes into fan technology for computers.

Wade Vinson, fan technologist at HP and Cooling Team member, said HP wanted to come up with a way to reduce power consumption without decreasing the size of the chassis or taking out features such as memory. That's when Vinson's boss, Ron Noblett, vice-president for shared engineering services for ISS, who flies model airplanes as a hobby, suggested he look into using electric duct fan (EDF) technology -- the same technology that propels the planes -- to cool servers.

A couple of Google searches later, Vinson and Noblett landed on the doorsteps of a shop near Houston called New Creations RC, where they found boxes of EDF parts.

“At that point, we knew we had an answer,” said Vinson. “It allows us to support the density of the servers.”

That was in 2004. Since then, Vinson and his team completely redesigned the technology and currently have 19 patents pending with an additional patent that was approved by the Patent Trade Organization earlier this month. The new design uses one-third less power than a typical 1 U rack server, which use an average of 18 fans using 60 watts versus 20 watts on average with the new technology. HP currently has no plans to licence the Active Cool Fan technology to other hardware vendors.

The c-Class also saves on power with faster throughput (five terabits of throughput per second) that allows server administrators to manage resources via virtualized Ethernet and Fibre Channel connections.

Despite all the hype around blade technology and its growing popularity in the market, blades represent a small percentage of servers sold overall, said Illuminata's Haff.

“The basic reason is that vendors HP and IBM are figuring out how to do blades,” said Haff. “Blades provide physical advantages in terms of tabling.”

The blade market is currently a two-horse race, with HP and IBM competing for top spot, added Haff. Dell has tried, and failed, to launch a blade product that captures the numbers its high volume servers generate. Sun, which recently launched two SPARC-based servers, Niagara and Galaxy, currently does not have any blades on the market but has indicated that it will have products coming out in the future.

Cerner‘s Stuckey, however, said blade technology was the only way that it could scale up its infrastructure to meet it's company's growing hosting needs.

“Given the growth that we've experienced I don't know that we could have expanded this quickly and responded to the changes that we have to with anything other than blade technology,” he said.

Comment: info@itbusiness.ca

share: