The IDC white paper Virtualizing the Infrastructure with Sun x86 Blades (login or registration required) by Jed Scaramella and Jean S. Bozman examines the ongoing customer requirements for server platforms and the concomitant upward pressure on power and cooling costs as datacenters become increasingly crowded with computer systems.

The authors point out that power and cooling costs have risen at four times the growth rate of the actual costs of acquiring the servers themselves while management costs have grown at eight times the acquisition-price growth rate.

Beyond that, the authors contend, the sheer number of server footprints has multiplied so quickly that the overall solution has become too complex to manage either easily or cost-effectively. Cabling for rack-optimized servers, for example, has also become so tangled that, as Scaramella and Bozman point out, any reduction in cabling would also improve operational efficiency. A significant portion of the costs associated with this development, of course, is the time of IT staff.

The white paper describes new server blades from Sun Microsystems and a new shared NIC technology embedded within the Sun Blade Virtualized NEM, which are combined in a bladed server solution that enables the datacenter personnel to address many of these operational issues. The paper also describes the competitive nature of the blade server segment, which continues to be one of the fastest-growing segments within the worldwide server market and has attracted the attention of some of the largest IT companies worldwide.

The authors observe that, because of the impressive performance and management characteristics of x86 blade servers, they are being rapidly adopted to provide IT greater flexibility in deploying new workloads as well as in reallocating workloads to available compute resources as business needs change over time.

Blades lend themselves to the purposes of administrators bent on transforming the datacenter to support the improved operational characteristics associated with virtualization and workload consolidation projects.

Sun blades, the authors assert, are optimized for network-enabled workloads. The new Sun Blade Virtualized NEM supports I/O virtualization, improving the amount of I/O available to virtualized server blades running within the Sun blade systems. This change in architecture supports the increasing adoption of virtualization on x86 infrastructure and on the migration of enterprise workloads which require high levels of I/O, to blade server systems, according to Scaramella and Bozman. They point out that, by designing and implementing these blade servers, Sun is providing a platform for highly virtualized workloads, for flexible IT, and for improved operational characteristics, all of which reduce ongoing operational costs, which benefits business.

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