SearchSystemsChannel.com: How can channel professionals encourage end customers to adopt blade servers? Can you discuss the main selling points?
Barb Goldworm: The selling points for blades server start with significant value from high density. The number of servers that you can fit in the same footprint in your data center is substantially higher. Implementing blades is going to allow me to pack more servers in the same footprint. But the important selling points have to do with bottom-line dollar amounts: It may cost more upfront to move to a blade architecture because you have to purchase the chassis, but the benefits include more efficient power utilization, more efficient cooling capabilities and components sharing. From a simplicity standpoint, blades offer significant benefits because everything is prewired inside the chassis. We have a picture in our book of a server room with wires running all over the place, and then we show a picture of a populated blade system and the wiring is perfect looking and not just because of a good IT guy. Prewiring and modularity also translates into less time to provision new servers. If I -- as an IT professional -- need to deploy a new server out to my end users, both blades and virtualization can make that provisioning very simple; all I have to do is pop in a blade (if I even need to do that) provision it and bring it up live. If I'm using VMware or a server virtualization tool, then I can provision it virtually. I might not even need to add a new piece of hardware.
What we hear from users is that with blades and virtualization, the time to provision -- the time from when they get a request until they can bring the users up -- has been dramatically reduced, sometimes from weeks down to hours.
10 tips in 10 minutes from Barb Goldworm
Home: Introduction
1: Blade server and virtualization benefits
2: Ideal blade server candidates
3: How to sell blade servers
4: Blade server and virtualization misconceptions
5: Preparing to deploy blade servers and virtualization
6: Server virtualization channel impact
7: Future of blade servers and virtualization
8: Blade server and virtualization consulting
9: Server Blade Summit must-attend sessions
10: Blade server and virtualization resources
About Barb Goldworm: Barb Goldworm is founder, president and chief analyst of Focus Consulting and author of the book Blade Servers and Virtualization. She has spent over 30 years in systems and storage in various senior management, marketing, sales, technical and industry analyst positions with IBM, StorageTek, Novell, Enterprise Management Associates and several successful startup ventures. A frequent speaker at industry events, she also created and chaired Interop's Networked Storage Track. More recently, she was one of the top three ranked analyst/knowledge expert speakers at SNW and has been a regular expert speaker for TechTarget and Ziff-Davis E-seminars. She also chairs the Server Blade Summit on Blades and Virtualization.
