Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs [Hardcover]

Barb Goldworm (Author), Anne Skamarock (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471783951 | ISBN-13: 978-0471783954 | Publication Date: February 12, 2007 | Edition: 1

• Blade server systems and virtualization are key building blocks for Next Generation Enterprise Data centers
• Blades offer modular, pre-wired, ultra high-density servers (up to 10x traditional servers) with shared components (power, cooling, switches) – reducing complexity and cost, and improving flexibility, availability, manageability, and maintainability
• Virtualization enables consolidation of physical servers by allowing many virtual servers to run concurrently on one physical server – improving system utilization, reducing the total number of physical servers, reducing costs, and increasing flexibility
• This is the first book covering these complementary technologies and how, together, they provide a strong foundation for the future
• It examines the history, architectures, features, examples, and user case studies of blade systems and virtualization, and offers guidance and considerations for how to evaluate and implement solutions

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Get up to speed on blade servers and virtualization

The combination of blade servers and virtualization provides you with the flexibility, high availability, and manageability to deliver services on demand to users anywhere, anytime. Guiding you through these two technologies, this book clearly shows you why they are rapidly becoming key foundation building blocks for the next generation of data centers.

Experts Goldworm and Skamarock explore the benefits of blade servers and virtualization, presenting you with an architectural view of each. They also include an analysis of the major offerings along with case studies and tips for selecting products. This information will help you successfully implement these technologies on your own.

Here's the information to power up your data center

• Assess the needs of your company and determine whether blade servers and virtualization are the right choices.
• Utilize the specific features of blade server systems and their components.
• Analyze the approaches and architectures of various alternatives.
• Compare and contrast different vendor solutions in order to make the best selection.
• Decide on hardware, system software, and data center facilities.
• Gain a better understanding of the trade-offs, pitfalls, and other considerations that must be taken into account.
• Learn how to successfully integrate blade servers and virtualization into your production environment.

About the Author

BARB GOLDWORM is President of Focus Consulting, an IT analysis and consulting firm. A frequent speaker and writer for TechTarget publications, ComputerWorld, and others, she has worked with systems and storage for thirty years.

ANNE SKAMAROCK has nearly thirty years of in-depth technical experience as an end-user, vendor, analyst, columnist, and consultant. She also co-authored Storage Solutions: A Buyer's Guide.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 408 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (February 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471783951
• ISBN-13: 978-0471783954
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #504,876 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Informative, but not the whole story, December 28, 2007

By 

Jeff (Northern California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs (Hardcover)

It doesn't take very long to figure out that the authors really like blade servers.

They like their space savings, cable plant simplicity, and uniformity. There are very detailed (although never critical) descriptions of each manufacturer's product lines and some very exhaustive matrices comparing not only blade servers but virtualization products as well.

My problems are in the details. First of all, it is clear that in many cases the benefits being credited to blade servers accrue ONLY because those blade servers are running virtualization products. Moreover, in many cases it is unclear why the benefits would not have accrued to commodity scale out servers running virtualization products.

Two, there are some claims that just stretch credulity too far. For instance, it is claimed that a provisioning a new blade server can be done in a few hours while doing the same with a rack mount server can take weeks.

Bearing in mind that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all constructed their massive data centers with rack mount servers, you have to wonder how they could have made the same mistake (from the author's point of view) several hundred thousand times for each vendor.

The fact of the matter is that blades are a perfect choice for certain data center environments, but not others. Today they constitute ~ 15 % of all server shipments and most vendors hope to get that up to ~20% by 2010.

What's the hold up? Well, blade servers cost more per unit of computing power. Their form factors are proprietary, so their is considerable vendor lock-in (and thus higher prices). And the switches built for each blade center are vastly more expensive and slower to adopt new features than standalone modular or fixed form factor switches.

Conversely, virtualization is a wonderful add-on for certain types of compute applications, but not all. (For the technically inclined, if compute latency is at a premium, or the computations requires large amounts of state to be held in memory, then virtualization is going to be at best a mixed blessing and quite possibly make things worse.) Such limitations are alluded to peripherally, but never spoken to head on.

That's a darn shame. Had the authors included a chapter on when blades make sense and when virtualization makes sense, this would have easily been a 5 star book for me. The writing style is lucid and flows well. The authors are clearly experienced in their field. However, the assertion that blades and virtualization are a broad based panacea for most types of organizations and data centers just does not conform to the facts.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Asks and Answers All the Right Questions, March 29, 2007

By 

Curtis Hotzinger (Denver, CO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs (Hardcover)

We knew we were running out of space and power in our data center, and a blade environment might be the solution. But how do you even begin amassing the information to make the right decisions to solve our dilemma? I consider this book necessary reading for anyone considering the plunge into blade technology. Not only did it address my questions and concerns, it introduced me to potential problems and solutions I hadn't even considered! Now I feel confident that I have a valuable tool to aid me throughout the design and implementation stages of our conversion from stand-alone servers running at 5% utilization to blade chassis running multiple virtual servers at 50% utilization. The authors clearly know and address the benefits and pitfalls of this relatively new technology. I especially enjoyed the case studies. They allowed me to see what difficulties other companies in similar situations faced, and how they solved their problems. If there is another book out there that details these issues in a vendor non-specific format, I haven't found it.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Belongs on Every Virtualization Bookshelf, July 18, 2007

By 

C. Wolf (New Jersey) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs (Hardcover)

This book is a great complement to the multitude of virtualization books out there (my own included). Hardware design and sizing for virtualization is critical in all virtualization migration projects and this book does a great job examining all of the available blade solutions and architectures at your disposal. The authors also provide granular analysis of all major vendor solutions (HP, IBM, Dell, Egenera, etc.). Coverage of clustering and virtualization software is also included.

The scope of the book is vast (blades, virtualization software, power and cooling, management -- to name a few topics), so it's unfair to expect every detail of every topic to emerge in the text (the book would be 10,000 pages if it did). But if you want a book that connects all of the dots in the modern data center, then this book is for you. With coverage of all data center technologies and the vendors that provide them, this book is sure to accelerate the preparation and architectural work needed in any virtualization migration project.

~Chris Wolf