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Today, I will talk to you about how to compare blade servers with rack servers. Many people may not know much about it. In order to make you understand better, the editor summed up the following contents for you. I hope you can get something from this article.

Due to factors such as limited space in the enterprise computer room, blade servers and rack servers are becoming more and more popular among users, so what are their characteristics? which is better, blade or rack server? This article will do analysis and comparison.

The servers we often see can be divided into three types of appearance, namely, tower servers, rack servers, and blade servers. Due to factors such as limited space in the enterprise computer room, blade servers and rack servers are becoming more and more popular among users, so what are their characteristics? which is better, blade or rack server? This article will discuss this issue with you.

Rack server and its characteristics

Rack servers are servers that can be installed directly into a standard 19-inch cabinet. Usually, such servers are somewhat similar to switches in terms of size, so rack servers are actually products under industrial standardization. Its appearance is designed according to a unified standard and used uniformly with cabinets to meet the server-intensive deployment needs of enterprises. The main function of rack server is to save space, because multiple servers can be installed on one cabinet, which not only takes up less space, but also facilitates unified management. The height of an ordinary cabinet is 42U (1U=1.75 inches or 4.4cm), the width of rack servers is 19 inches, and most rack servers are 1U-4U high. Rack servers have the advantages of small footprint and easy unified management, but due to internal space constraints, scalability is limited. For example, most 1U servers have only 1 or 2 PCI expansion slots. In addition, heat dissipation performance is also a problem that needs to be paid attention to, in addition, organic cabinets and other equipment are needed, so this kind of server is mostly used by large enterprises with a large number of servers, and many enterprises use this type of server. however, the server is delivered to a special server hosting organization, especially at present, the servers of many websites are used in this way.

II. Blade server and its characteristics

Blade server is a kind of high availability, high density and low cost server platform, which is specially designed for special application industry and high density computer environment. Its main structure is a large main chassis, and many "blades" can be inserted inside. Each blade is actually a system motherboard, similar to individual servers, which can boot their own operating system through the local hard disk. Each blade can run its own system, serve a specified different user group, and have no correlation with each other. Moreover, these motherboards can be grouped into a server cluster with system software. In cluster mode, all blades can be connected to provide a high-speed network environment, share resources, and serve the same user group. Inserting new blades into the cluster can improve overall performance. Because each blade is hot-swappable, the system can be easily replaced and maintenance time is minimized.

According to the server functions required, the blade server is divided into server blades, network blades, storage blades, management blades, fibre Channel SAN blades, extended iUnix O blades and other corresponding blade servers with different functions. The blade server has two recognized characteristics: one is to overcome the shortcomings of the chip server cluster and is become the Terminator of the cluster; the other is to achieve cabinet optimization.

Third, full comparison of the advantages of blade server and rack server

At present, driven by multi-core and low-power technology, blade server products will develop from the initial pursuit of high-density blade servers to a new generation of blade products that emphasize overall performance and high productivity. Blade servers will focus on higher density, agile deployment and maintenance, omni-directional monitoring and management, high scalability and high availability, and will become a mature mainstream product that keeps pace with rack servers. At present, the blade server has opened a breakthrough in many industries, the market demand is constantly stimulated, and the future of the blade server market attracts people's attention.

At present, as a new star in the server field, the market prospect brought by this high-density blade server has been optimistic by the major server manufacturers, including international brands such as IBM, HP, SUN, DELL and domestic well-known brands such as Lenovo, Tide, dawning, etc. Let's compare the advantages of blade servers and rack servers.

1. Blade server and rack server in terms of space density

Blade servers save more space than rack servers, which actually increase the space density of rack servers by 50% again. Under the premise that the cabinet system is configured, the 1U rack optimization server system is transplanted to the blade server, and the space occupied is only the original one, one, three, and one, two. In a standard cabinet environment, the processing density of blade servers is increased by four to five times. For example, in a high-density computing server environment with 1024 nodes, if all servers with 1U configuration are used, 24 cabinets are required, excluding the cabinet space occupied by Ethernet switching hubs. The blade server with eight "blades" requires only nine cabinets, but includes the cabinet space of the Ethernet switching hub.

2. Blade server and rack server from the point of view of computer room wiring and management.

Blade server wiring in the computer room as long as a unified network cable, power cable, there is no need for artificial wiring between blade servers; while rack servers have to carry out network cable and power cable for each server respectively. If multiple 1U servers are installed on a 42U cabinet, the wiring behind the cabinet is very large and looks messy. If we need 10 highly reliable 1U rack servers with KVM, network, and management functions, then we need 20 power supplies (redundant power supplies), 10 KVM cables, at least 20 network cables (one management cable and one network cable for each server), not including cables to connect external storage and other devices. The cable wiring of the blade server scheme is obviously better than that of the 1U rack scheme.

From a TCO perspective, blade servers are easier to manage, provide more processing power in less space, and cost less. Because many parts can be shared, unlike 1U servers. For example, in the above example, with the blade server, we no longer need 10 DVD drives, 10 different remote management modules, and 20 power supplies.

3. Blade server and rack server in terms of flexibility

Most blade servers are not as flexible as rack servers. For example, blades cannot be equipped with disk arrays through external raid cards in high-performance database applications. In addition, if users need a database server with a large amount of memory and do not want to build it through a cluster, the blade will also seem inadequate. Because rack servers with 16 memory slots are easy to buy on the market, while most blade servers can only support 4-8 memory slots. It can be seen that the flexibility of the blade server is relatively weak, even if there is a suitable product, the price is extremely high.

In most cases, the blade supports a 2.5-inch hard drive, which is not only more expensive than a 3.5-inch hard drive, but also has lower performance, thanks to the blade's pursuit of high density. Today, a typical blade can only fit 140GB hard drives at most, while many rack products can be equipped with the storage capacity of 2TB (4X500GB).

4. Blade server and rack server from the point of view of purchasing cost

In theory, the purchase cost of blade servers will be lower than that of the same number of rack servers due to the reduction of many repetitive unnecessary components such as DVD, power, and KVM and network cables. Each blade server manufacturer has its own proprietary blade architecture, which makes the prices of IBM, HP and DELL blades high because of its monopoly.

It is believed that fully equipped blade servers still save a lot of money compared with the most expensive rack servers from the same manufacturer. But in fact, if users adopt the practice of "gradually adding blades in the chassis", they will find that rack servers are more cost-effective. Because most blades and related products are more expensive than their corresponding rack products, the average blade chassis costs $4000 to $8000, and blades are more expensive than 1U racks, at least not cheap.

5. Blade servers and rack servers in terms of scalability and standards

The advantage of 1U rack server is that it adopts standard server design technology, standard peripherals, standard interface, RAID function, redundancy function, and can run and undertake tasks independently. In terms of scalability, the rack server has poor expansion performance in the chassis because of the small chassis space, but it can be expanded very effectively through server clusters or external expansion cabinets. The blade server is innovative in both upward and outward expansion. To add a new server, you usually only need to insert a new single-processor or multiprocessor blade server into the open bay of the chassis. Blade servers can be plugged into the expanded infrastructure. In addition, the option module inside the chassis allows us to add functions that can be shared once connected externally. The modular design of blade technology can achieve rapid expansion. The blade products of IBM, HP and DELL are not compatible, there is no standardization, and even different blade chassis standards from the same manufacturer are different. Rack servers are made with a unified standard, and IBM's 2U servers can be installed in DELL's 42U server cabinets.

6. Blade server and rack server in terms of reliability and maintenance

When the ordinary 1U rack server scheme is adopted, a large number of potential "problem points" are formed by the connection points generated by a large number of power cables and network cables. after the blade server chassis and blade server solution are replaced, the original network and power connection points are reduced, and the reliability of the system is increased.

All key components of the blade server are redundant or hot-swappable, including cooling systems, power supplies, Ethernet controllers and switches, midplane and backplane, hard drives, and service processors. Removing the server for repair simply means dragging the blade server out of the chassis, which is as simple as removing a hot-swappable hard drive. Advanced blade server system provides an intelligent way to achieve highly sensitive maintenance, advanced diagnostic functions can guide maintenance personnel to find faulty parts directly, so as to achieve fast and effective recovery, and some blade servers do not even have a single point of failure.

Rack server maintenance is more complex than blades. In short, rack servers and blade servers are functional servers that focus on a specific application. Rack servers can meet the needs of users' applications, the integration of blade servers is too intensive, and the standards and heat dissipation have not been completely solved, and blade servers are suitable for a large number of machines to form clusters for users to use. therefore, blade servers have not occupied an absolute advantage compared with rack servers so far.

After reading the above, do you have any further understanding of how to compare blade servers with rack servers? If you want to know more knowledge or related content, please follow the industry information channel, thank you for your support.

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