Blade Servers, A Step Towards Green Technologies

Scaring general public with frightening figures and statistics is one of the only tasks of Environmentalist around the world but this pressure tactics keep companies investing in new technologies bringing environment friendly machines and devices. Blade Servers are becoming popular day by day as "Green Technology" because of their low energy consumption and compact size.

Blade Servers are collection of thin modular electronic circuits into single chassis. These thin electronics modules are complete servers in themselves and are called "Server Blades" or "Blade" in short. Usually all of these Blades are dedicated to single purpose, e.g. a "Website Hosting Server" will use all of their blades for among web hosting only, and all of the blades of "File Server" will be used only for file hosting. Blade servers are also very popular among web hosting companies who offer Virtual Private Servers as they help to offer low price and top quality hosting services with high security.

All the blades within a blade server are designed to share common high speed bus which reduces the cables required to connect to each other and their design emphasis on the less production of heat which reduce the consumption of energy to control the temperature using air conditioning systems. The compactness of a blade server not only reduce the space requirements but it also help to improve system management. A detailed study of blade server in data centers around the world revealed that blade server based systems can reduce the consumption of cables up to 85% as compared to conventional 1U or tower servers.

Comparison of Popular Blade Servers

There are many big names in market claiming to be the best blade server providers, but a major portion of market is captured by HP (52.4%) and IBM blade servers are second highest popular (35.1%), while Dell, Sun Micro systems and Cisco are among the other competitors. A quick summary IBM and HP Systems is given below.

IBM BladeCenter HX5

Fifth-generation IBM X-Architecture Technology

Up to Two Intel Xeon 6500 or 7500 Series Processors.

Popular for Database and Virtualization

Maximum 640 GB DDR3 Memory Capacity

Partition a Four-Processor Blade to Two, Two-Processor Blades without Physical Reconfiguration.

HP ProLiant BL200c

Latest 2 and 4 Core Processors and Memory

Designed for High Performance Computing

Maximum 2 Processors with 6, 4 or 2 Cores

Maximum Up to 182 GB DDR3 Memory

Most of the modern data centers are now moving towards blade server technology that's why many web hosting companies are claiming to be environment friendly.

Author is Imperial College London Illimani and CEO of nitGreen Web Solutions , a company providing website hosting, web design, e-Commerce solutions and search engine optimization services SEO