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Like HP, RLX covers both the high end and the low end (after a start focusing on the low end); Egenera targets financial and other vertical markets with high-end offerings similar to IBM’s. Down the road, it’s not a far stretch to imagine market synergy resulting in IBM making a play for Egenera or HP making a play for RLX.
The following chart breaks out the offerings from the top blade vendors, in terms of revenue and mind share.
|
Vendor
|
Chassis
|
Max No.
of Blades per Form Factor |
Blade Models
|
Processors
|
Target(s)
|
Vendor Perks
|
| IBM | BladeCenter | 14 per 7U | HS20, HS40, JS20 |
32-bit Xeon (HS line), 64-bit Power 970 (JS) | High-end, mission-critical deployments | Power 64-bit option; IBM’s mainframe experience and engineering budget; tightly partnered with Intel toward hardware standardization |
| HP | ProLiant BL e | 20 per 3U | BL 10e G2 | Pentium M | Low-end edge, high-performance computing apps | Varied, high-/low-end approach; manageability and ubiquity focus; desktop options; HP’s budget and ability to juggle heterogeneous server lines |
| ProLiant BL p |
8 Xeon DP or 2 Xeon MP per 7U |
BL20p G2, BL40p |
2 (20 series) or 4 (40 series) Xeon | High-performance computing apps | ||
| Dell | 1655MC | 6 per 3U | 1655MC | Two Pentium III | Low-end edge, high-performance apps | “Dell simple,” though Dell downplays blades’ importance |
| Egenera | BladeFrame | 24 2-way or 4-way servers per enclosure | Cblade, Pblade, and Sblade | Cblades (Control Blades) and Sblades (Switch Blades) are farmed-out networking and storage components. Pblades use 32-bit Xeon DP or MP. Each interoperates to make Egenera blades tick. |
High end, financial services in particular, with innovative Processing Area Network (PAN) manager software. |
Time in market; well-developed blade-specific PAN manager software; separate storage and network layers for a truly modular approach |
| BladeFrame ES | 6 2-way or 4-way servers per enclosure | Same as BladeFrame, but more compact | ||||
| RLX | 300ex | 24 1-way per 3U | 800i, 1200i |
Low-voltage Pentium III | High density blades for scale-out | Time in market; number of models; variety of high- and low-end processor options; strong, blade-specific Control Tower management software |
| 600ex | 10 2-way per 6U | 2600ie, 2800i, 2800ie, 3000i, 3000ix, 3200ix |
Single or dual Xeons of increasing power by model number | High performance |
Despite the nascent state of the blade space, these aren’t the only players. In mid-2003, when it last broke out blades, Gartner found that sales in the blade space mirrored the overall server market. Following Dell’s distant third to IBM and HP, was SPARC contender and x86 dabbler Sun. Gartner attributes this to perennial SPARC demand and a confused x86 strategy that focused on both AMD Athlon Mobile and Intel chips. Gartner placed RLX sixth worldwide, and Egenera, although not listed, was considered seventh.
Egenera stands apart from the crowd in terms of design and manageability, virtualizing all aspects of its blade architecture with its own design solutions. “That means getting rid of things like onboard disks or physical NIC cards,” says Susan Davis, Egenera vice president of marketing. “Those things give a server a fixed identity and make it a very static resource,” she added, “so what we did was take those things off the server and transform them into software, so you can centrally manage them.”
While it is accepted as an almost universal truth that management software differentiates one blade offering from another, another more basic differentiator for individual blades is coming back into play: heat and power.
Gartner has determined with certainty that blades in general offer a value proposition in terms of heat output and power used compared to traditional rack-mount counterparts. It also found results vary by vendor. Although Wright would not provide specifics, she said that an upcoming report will reveal which vendors have mastered the heat output/power usage equation better than others.
