System iNetwork

June 9, 2008

Bullish on Blades -- But Customers Hard to Find

Ninety percent of System i clients can fit on a POWER6-based blade, currently the 2-core 3.8 GHz JS12 and 4-core 4.0 GHz JS22, according to Mark Shearer, vice president of marketing for IBM Business Systems. Both blades are wicked fast, but it turns out that "fit" is more closely aligned with horsepower than trunk space. Although a Chevy Silverado pickup customer could theoretically upgrade to a Corvette, the driver might have to customize the Corvette with a hitch to drag along a storage trailer loaded with reality.

To put this in perspective and see how early interest in i blades is shaping up, I spoke with Stan Staszak, director of System i/x products for Sirius, an IBM Premier Business Partner. Interest, it turns out, is high, but sales are super low.

"We've been struggling to find the ideal customer or the perfect fit for the new blades," notes Staszak. "Ideally it would be a customer who already has the BladeCenter H chassis. Optimally you'd also want the customer to have either the DS4000 or DS8000 [series] external storage server. The challenge is, that's a really small subset of our customers. I'm sure those customers are out there and exist, but they also have to have the overlap of being an i-based shop."

Officially, in the BladeCenter H chassis for IBM i storage, IBM supports the IBM System Storage DS4700, DS4800, 8100, and DS8300 products connected via the VIOS partition.

Non-Compatible Storage

"It seems like the external storage has been the show stopper. Even if they are considering adopting the blade technology, they already have an investment in a non-compatible storage server," Staszak explains.

"I think the way we are ultimately going to overcome that is that IBM is going to have to do some additional testing to certify other storage servers. Based on the fact that we are utilizing Virtual I/O Server, it really shouldn't matter," he adds, noting that customers who have a different storage solution might be able to use it -- but it wouldn't be supported.

"I respect the fact that Rochester is being very conservative, and that's why they've only certified initially the DS4000 and 8000 because those are the only two they've tested. I think in the future we'll see some additional testing," Staszak says.

RAIDing the S

"Another thing I'd like to see is RAID support for the BladeCenter S chassis. If we could take advantage of the onboard disk in a JS12 or JS22 and utilize a subset of the 12 disks that are in a BladeCenter S chassis, but also support RAID, I think that would be a nice little offering. Right now we're forced to do either non-protected or mirroring and we're very limited by the maximum of 12 disks in that enclosure," Staszak explains. "So we're back to, 'OK, Mr. Customer, do you have any other external storage, and, if so, what type?'"

Where's the Fit Now?

If a customer doesn't already have a supported storage solution, who's going to buy a BladeCenter S? Staszak can see it going into organizations that have multiple distributed small servers, for example a retail environment that might also have a couple of Intel servers that could also be installed on the BladeCenter S.

Customers migrating from an older server that doesn't necessarily have a nice upgrade path might look at migrating to a blade-based environment. "But if they've got multiple towers worth of I/O adapters . . . probably not a good fit, so that's another important consideration: what kinds of adapters do they have today? And what are they actually using?" Staszak says, noting that some customers can be weaned off some of their more esoteric adapters.

Still, "If you're looking at the JS22, which has 13,800 CPW, you need a fair amount of disk arms to support that," he says.

"Based on the fact they are very powerful processors, we need to see some benchmarks as far as disk I/O performance, even using the DS4000 or 8000 with Virtual I/O Server, I'm hesitant to recommended it until we do some testing to make sure disk I/O is not a bottleneck," he explains.

Sirius has run through a lot of different scenarios for customers, but in most cases, the standalone box running IBM i 5.4 or 6.1 has remained the more attractive option -- though that's not to say blades aren't going to become a better solution as IBM keeps refining its offerings.

"I think blades are going to help people stay on the platform, and I'm ecouraged to see Rochester take these steps. I'm a big fan, a big proponent of the blade in general," Staszak says. "In the future, five-to-ten years, it's going to be widely adopted. We're still in the ramp-up phase."

Posted by cmaxcer at June 9, 2008 9:43 AM