Blades: Good fit, bad heat, but nothing ugly

[Gizmo]

From the Front Page:
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/content/view/870/2/

[Daniel ~]

They look great on TV. That's about as much as I know about them...How many of these suckers can be linked together?

[Gizmo]

The basic premise of a 'blade' server is to allow you to take multiple PCs and put them in a single box. When you think about it, most of a PC (even a high-end server) is really empty space, particularly if you are talking about web servers and the like. If you take the entire PC and turn it into a plugin card, you have a 'blade' server. You then build a box to hold these 'blades' and all of a sudden you can fit 10 or 12 servers into the space that you could previously only fit one.

Sounds great, right? Well that's what the article is about; not everything is golden. As with any tool, whether a 'blade' server is the best tool for the job rather depends on exactly what the problem is that you are trying to solve.

[Aedan]

Ya, blade servers are a good way of increasing the computing density for a given space. Of course, that brings it's own issues, such as heat production.

[Daniel ~]

Ah, so they aren't going for a combined power of x numbers of CPU's, but rather the space saving made available by a high density neighborhood.(?)

[Gizmo]

Originally Posted by Daniel ~

Ah, so they aren't going for a combined power of x numbers of CPU's, but rather the space saving made available by a high density neighborhood.(?)

Exactly.
However, there is nothing to prevent them from combining CPU horsepower as well. Unfortunately, this is not the same thing as running a multiple-core CPU. Ganging multiple computers together to solve a problem is known as 'clustering' or more generically as 'distributed computing'. Taking advantage of this requires applications specifically written to work in this fashion.

[Daniel ~]

You see! It's not imposible to teach me something!