Quick Blade from Compaq

Munich 23 July 2001 On the press meeting, Andre Brynard, Product Manager Industry Standard Server Group, Compaq EMEA, presented the coming product Quick Blade. These computers are space and technology optimised. Today 48 1U (pizzabox) servers can be put into one rack. With blades this goes up to 280 processors. Brynard gave a short overview of the business perspectives and the technology. As this a non-announced product, the audience did not get a copy of the slides

Brynard started that we are today 5 to 6 months off the product. Thus it can be expected that Compaq delivers systems in the beginning of next year. In Q1 Compaq sold 50% dense systems - rack optimised. These systems should deploy quickly, 1 to 2 hours after unpacking going into operation. The data centres need space and power efficient systems, computing on demand and rapid deployment and provisioning. An other requirement is the scalable management of the machines and the people needed. New business metrices are coming, transactions/Watt/U, people to server ration, time to service (billing), virtual management from 1 to thousands oft servers, anywhere, anytime. These requirements drive a new server architecture.

Quick Blade

The important issues are:

  • rapid deployment and redeployment
  • simple cabling
  • common power and management
  • rapid serviceability and continuous uptime
  • Blade to Blade failover
There will be different types of blades with one to four processors. They can be used in the front end, in the mid-tier and high-performance systems in the back-end.

It will be possible to mix the Blades with existing legacy servers and storage. Compaq builds some power headroom into the Blades. Surely we will hear soon some details of the blades. It is interesting that Dell announced in May 2001 that it is working on blades.

Uwe Harms

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