Blade.org, the industry consortium driving open innovation in blade-based solutions, has convened its inaugural Blade.org Technology Symposium to launch the key "Mega-Trend" innovations that will influence how organizations transform their datacenters in the future.
At the Blade.org Technology Symposium, visionary technologists from Morgan Stanley, The Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at North Carolina State University, GameVee.com and Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors joined with leading suppliers of blade-based datacenter technology like APC, BLADE Network Technologies, Brocade, Devon IT, Emulex, IBM, Intel, NetApp, NetXen, QLogic, VirtenSys and VMware. These experts detailed the emerging mega-trends of converged networks, advanced energy efficiency and hyper consolidation, which will unify datacenter I/O on a single wire, reduce energy waste and enable unprecedented datacenter densities.
The mega-trends that blade.org believes will change the future of business computing are:
Converged Networks: Today datacenters use separate "input/output (I/O) lanes" for data networking, storage traffic and inter-process communications, each of which require their own adapters, connectors and wires. In the future, datacenters will converge I/O on Ethernet, running all their traffic on a single "lane" or wire. This convergence is ideal for blade environments because they are tightly packed together with little room for extra components. Key developments in converged networking include the collaboration between BLADE Network Technologies, Emulex, NetApp and QLogic to pioneer Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) for converged data and storage networks.
Advanced Energy Efficiency: Use of blade technology is anticipated to represent more than 25 percent of server deployments by 2010. The need to dissipate the heat generated by this highly power-dense technology must keep pace; however, in recent years, traditional cooling system design has proven inadequate to remove concentrated heat loads. In the future, datacenters will minimize energy use and reduce carbon footprint by turning to such alternatives as water-cooled and/or container-based datacenters and close-to-chassis heat rejection that can eliminate much of the 45 percent of electrical energy in the datacenter that is wasted by today's cooling systems. "Gartner states that in-rack and in-row cooling will emerge as the predominant cooling strategy by 2011 for high-density equipment," said Blade.org Technology Symposium presenter Jim Simonelli, chief technology officer of APC. "This strategy closely couples the cooling unit to the heat emanating from the rack or row of servers. The design eliminates performance uncertainties and hot spots that exist -- especially when datacenter professionals attempt to cool high density racks using a perimeter cooling strategy. Row-oriented cooling also improves energy efficiency since this approach reduces the distance cold air must travel to cool the servers, resulting in reduced fan power -- the dominant source of electrical energy consumption in a datacenter's cooling system."
"There will be a real focus at the server ingredient level to reduce power requirements and improve energy efficiency while increasing performance," said Symposium presenter Rob Nance, Chief Architect, High Density Computing Group for Intel. "The result will be that datacenter managers can deploy more compute power in their existing facilities without upgrading their infrastructures."
Hyper consolidation: Today datacenters are focused on server consolidation. In the future, clients will "hyper consolidate" servers, workstations and network devices into an integrated blade environment. For example, Blade.org member Devon IT's new approach to dense desktop consolidation on blades achieves exceptional scalability, improved security and tremendous power savings by consolidating desktops on blade servers and delivering graphics and multimedia to the user directly from blade installations.