1 Issue 1 1 HP BladeSystem Leadership and Innovation for the Data Center 3 From the Gartner Files: HP BladeSystem Leadership and Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers Innovation for the Data Center 17 About HP Featuring the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Blades Choosing the best HP BladeSystem is the market leading choice of IT technology is professionals for good reasons: paramount to meet your business needs • HP BladeSystem is the foundation for industry to improve business leading solutions that deliver superior agility and maximize investment protection every step of the way on benefit from your IT your path to the cloud budget. The Gartner Magic Quadrant is • HP BladeSystem is the leading platform a trusted source of for virtualization and cloud, delivering objective, independent breakthrough economics research on information technology. In Gartner’s new 2013 Blade Server • HP BladeSystem provides intelligence and Magic Quadrant, HP has been positioned as a automation to simplify management and give leader for both completeness of vision and ability you unprecedented insight into your data to execute, for which it received the highest center ratings. HP is positioned as a market leader for its commitment to innovation, partnerships and • HP’s blade market share is more than double solutions. the combined share of its two closest competitors Gartner Magic Quadrants are a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide- At HP we are committed to helping you angle view of the relative positions of the market’s transform your data center. Your business users competitors. By applying a graphical treatment and customers demand immediate access to and a uniform set of evaluation criteria, a Gartner information and services. Now you can equip your Magic Quadrant quickly helps you digest how well data center with built-in intelligence to work more technology providers are executing against their efficiently, staying ahead of evolving demands. stated vision. The Gartner research attached to It’s an advantage you can only get with the latest this newsletter provides findings and analysis on HP BladeSystem advancements—engineering the worldwide server blade market. breakthroughs that give you the ability to: Featuring research from 2 • Simplify and automate your infrastructure with efficiencies in system management, monitoring, and provisioning, optimizing IT staff resources • Maximize power infrastructure efficiency to increase capacity and control with industry-first Power and Location Discovery Services. • Accelerate performance with next-generation technologies in the new HP BladeSystem c7000 Platinum enclosure, delivering the industry’s most advanced architecture. 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Vice President, Global Marketing HP Servers 3 From the Gartner Files: Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers The blade server market is becoming increasingly chassis interoperability between manufacturers, so polarized, with vendors deploying high-end users are effectively locked into whichever chassis integrated systems to help increase margins and design they favor. share of wallet, while the lower end of the market is inundated by multinode server designs that It is common for blades with higher complements address the market’s appetite for extreme scale- of processors or storage to be wider, so that two out workloads. or more chassis slots are consumed. There are four common form factors: full-height single Market Definition/Description width, full-height double width, half-height single Within this evaluation of the blade server market, width and half-height half width (for example, two we also include other modular server form factors blades in a single half-height slot). Blade chassis (such as multinode), given their proximity to the capacity can vary, and may be populated with market in terms of functionality and user buying blades of different types, including additional criteria. memory, storage devices and network switches, or other I/O modules for added connectivity. Most A blade server is a modular compute platform that blade chassis are designed to fit within standard combines blades into a custom-designed chassis to 19-inch racks, but some earlier enterprise blade create a fully functioning system. Multiple chassis platforms have been based on other dimensions. may then combine within a rack to create a larger It is easy to regard blade servers as being a system, and multiple racks may be combined distinct form factor that addresses different market to create a large system that could consume a requirements compared with rack-optimized whole aisle or container. Because blades can be servers. But all blades, by definition, leverage a bought and deployed individually, they become rack-based topology (usually based on the standard an efficient way to add compute resources when 19-inch form factor). With each generation, the maximum granularity is desired. distinction between blades and conventional rack-based servers becomes more blurred. The Although blades provide the computing power, the distinction is even harder to maintain with the chassis is really the most crucial investment. The advent of multinode (skinless) servers, which, chassis provides power and cooling provisioning like blades, utilize common system components, to all blades, along with various common such as shared power supplies and cooling fans, management functions. The chassis supports a and enable easy hardware provisioning. Unlike backplane that provides connectivity (and even blades, multinode servers are usually deployed aggregation) from server to server, or from server horizontally in trays that fit into the rack, but to storage or the network, but network and connectivity is equally proprietary. Blades become storage input/output (I/O) can also be directly hybrid solutions that exploit the standardization routed to the blades. While blade servers can of the 19-inch rack form factor, while imposing have onboard storage, the trend is toward diskless proprietary integration within the chassis. blades that are booted direct from a storage area network (SAN). While the blades will conform to Blades are not the only form of modular server; a common form factor (within the vendor’s own multinode servers are an even more rack-dense product strategy) to fit the chassis, they can have form factor that has emerged during the past four different processor and memory characteristics years to address many extreme scale-out workload to address a variety of workloads, and specialized requirements that, ironically, blades were first storage, graphics and other blades can be deployed designed to address. We now see the emergence together with servers. Some blade vendors can of extreme low-energy servers (typically based on combine two or more blades to become a larger, low-cost processors from Intel, AMD and ARM) that logical computer. Blade chassis designs are also will extend the horizontal scaling further – again, highly proprietary; there are no standards for usually based on some modular, tray-based form factor. 4 True multinode servers typically lack the The blade server market has largely stalled since availability of the richer tooling that benefits 2011, as cannibalization from multinode servers blade environments, so the two form factors has eroded the growth that blades had gained address distinctly different workload needs. As through increased market adoption of fabric- the addressable market for blade servers evolved based infrastructure (FBI). Based on 2012 data, toward more sophisticated and diverse workloads, blades still only represent about 12% of the total a vacuum in the server market gradually formed server market in units (down from 13% at the and blades became overengineered for their end of 2011) and 21% in revenue. This has barely original market objectives. Multinode servers are changed from 2011; in comparison, multinode an alternative form of modular design developed to servers now outsell blade servers in unit terms fill that vacuum. They are designed with a reduced (despite being sold for only a few years and number of racks, chassis and, in some cases, addressing a more limited volume market). In motherboard components to maximize server 2012, multinode servers represented a 15% unit density potential and to reduce manufacturing share (nearly doubled from 7.8% in 2011) and 10% cost, material use and power consumption. revenue share (again, nearly doubled from 5.3% in Typical designs involve a lack of outside sheet 2011). metal coverings (hence, the commonly used term “skinless”), compared with individual servers, as Because they favor more horizontally challenging well as shared power and cooling resources within workloads, most blade and multinode deployments the rack frame. favor x86 architectures; however, vendors such as HP, IBM and Oracle ship non-x86 blades, At first glance, multinode servers share many primarily targeted at Unix users, and vendors such common attributes with blade servers, which as Supermicro, SeaMicro (now owned by AMD), explains why some vendors