The future according to blade.org | | 2008-06-20 | | IBM and Intel sponsored blade server industry group, blade.org, has predicted three major trends that will reshape the datacentre.
- Convergence of I/O lanes for data networking, storage traffic and interprocess communications.
Currently each of these processes requires its own adapters, connectors, and wires, but in future datacentres will converge I/O on Ethernet, running all their traffic on a single ’lane’ or wire. This is ideal for blade environments because they allow little room for additional hardware components.
However, Ethernet technology still has some way to go before this can become practical though the development of lossless capability through the 10 Gigabit fabric, regarded as a foundation stone of such a system, is said to be in development.
- Energy efficiency not surprisingly is identified as a major trend.
The study notes that while blade servers are much more efficient than the equivalent rack of 1U servers, there is the temptation to fill the space saved with more servers.
Water Cooling has been much touted with Gartner predicting that 70% of data centres will use water cooling within three years, but the report concedes that other approaches will be needed.
- Hyper consolidation, driven by server virtualization and a predicted move toward consolidating servers, workstations and network devices into an integrated blade environment.
Blades and virtualization are both becoming more popular, and complement each other well. Blades in the datacenter will evolve to a hyper-consolidated model through virtual appliances in which all discrete servers, firewalls and other network devices will be consolidated into the blade chassis.
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