Fujitsu Siemens Computers is predicting that a new form of system architecture, the processor area network (or PAN), will soon dominate the data centre as large organisations look to consolidate their resources and reduce the cost of running and managing infrastructure. Fujitsu Siemens Computers believes that its recent successes with PRIMERGY BladeFrame systems in both the private and public sectors, demonstrates that attitudes towards server deployment are changing. CIOs are ready to embrace new architectures and ideas - especially if it means that they can simplify their data centre and reduce both their capital and their operational expenditure.
Director of Large Enterprise Business at Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Ian Snadden, says: "We have won a number of new customers in recent months on the strength of the very distinct and unique benefits that the PRIMERGY BladeFrame offers. Namely the simple fact that it dramatically reduces the amount of redundant IT that an organisation needs to deploy, together with the time and costs associated with application deployment. PRIMERGY BladeFrame can also significantly lower both an organisation's capital and operational expenditure.
With the PRIMERGY BladeFrame the number of servers needed to support major IT infrastructures can be reduced by as much as 90 per cent with a similar reduction in data centre components and the associated cost of maintenance and management. "With growing pressure to deliver high performance, full availability and measurable return on investment, it is no surprise that CIOs are starting to listen, says Snadden. "This is a concept that induces eureka moments of realisation in IT people. When the PRIMERGY BladeFrame architecture is being explained to them, they go from being sceptics to evangelists inside 30 minutes.
"The decision to purchase and deploy usually follows quickly. In one current scenario, a very large UK company that came to us only in June is now expecting to deploy its first PRIMERGY BladeFrame in September, with more to follow very soon after. In data centre terms that's extremely fast but they would not be making this investment if they were not certain that it would deliver very positive results - and we can absolutely assure them that it will.
The PRIMERGY BladeFrame architecture is unique. It makes use of all available processing power and either down-rates or suspends non-critical applications during times of peak demand. It was originally developed by Egenera - a company that was founded by former CTO of Goldman Sachs, Vern Brownell, specifically to solve the problem of data centre complexity - and it is now marketed by Fujitsu Siemens Computers as PRIMERGY BladeFrame.
According to Egenera up to 80 per cent of processor time on servers is redundant. The BladeFrame architecture makes full use of this lost time to run processes that are not time-critical, delivering additional value and investment return. Full redundancy is also built into the system architecture. It is also possible to hot-swap' server blades so that a unit can be removed at any time with no disruption to processing. This means that, should a blade fail for any reason, normal operation can continue without any interruption.