Vendors bringing blade servers to India; early days though

Blade server sales worldwide are expected to cross the billion dollar mark this year, says US-based market researcher International Data Corp (IDC).

Despite the minuscule contribution to that from Indian buyers, large companies like IBM and Hewlett Packard (HP) that dominate the market are exploring opportunities to sell blades in India as well.

Blade servers are modular, stacking up like books on a shelf and allow users to put more blades into the same chassis when required "� a key sales pitch behind HP's utility computing (pay as you go) thrust in the server market. Rival IBM has the market lead with some 38 per cent of the shipments, IDC says.

These companies and others like Dell and Sun account for over three quarters of the blade server market. Dell is the latest big player to bring blades to India. Last month, it announced its Power Edge 1855 blade servers were available here.

Dell says the servers were "ideal for organisations with data centre space and cooling constraints that deploy large scale web farms, application servers and high performance computing clusters, or as a consolidation platform for customers' business applications."

At Rs 1 lakh for a single blade, the servers may not be cheap, especially as most buyers wouldn't think of buying single blades. But, the vendors say, blades offer flexibility and other long term advantages.

Blades share the same chassis (including backplane, fans and management) so save floor space, reduce cabling and provide management flexibility.

Large software vendors are also talking about deployment of their software on blade servers for better total cost of ownership (TCO).

Among such companies is the German SAP AG, which makes huge software applications called enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages that help other large companies run themselves better.

Peter Zencke, a member of the executive board of the company, said recently, customers using SAP software were also evaluating the "use of blades to lower TCO".

Can Linux then be far behind? Earlier this year, Jim Stallings, a general manager with IBM, heading its Linux business, met a group of chief information officers here.

"There is an unstoppable wave of activity beyond hype," he told them, in verticals like petroleum where large number of servers are used, to exploit Linux clusters and blades.

In financial services, which is often among the first to spend on new technology, firms like Merrill Lynch, were using "a combination of clusters (for high performance computing), blades, workload consolidation and Linux in some way or the other" to bring down TCO, Stallings said.

When blades were first introduced over three years ago by a small US-based company, Egenera, large telecom utilities supposed to use them were collapsing.

But blades evolved and were repositioned with more features, for the large data centre, to play the role of the application server. From 1 per cent of all servers shipped in 2002, the year HP entered the fray, blades now account for almost 4 per cent of the server market. IDC expects blades to account for a quarter of all server shipments by 2007.

More vendors are joining the fray, Taiwanese computer maker, Acer, among them. Sam Thomas, an assistant general manager with the company, says a certain sophistication threshold was required for using blades, including robust after sales support infrastructure.

It isn't difficult to figure out that only the larger companies will be able to experiment with blades. These are also the ones who would use say an ERP package from SAP. They could include the large Indian businesses of multinationals like Daimler Chrysler and Coca Cola Co and Indian companies like ONGC, Reliance, Britannia and the Tata Group. It remains to be seen if they find it worthwhile to buy blades.