Sydney, Australia based-Ideas International Inc. has launched an open source-style website to compare and rate the functional capabilities of blade servers on Monday, April 7.

The IT research and analysis company’s new site for Collaborative Product Evaluation looks at medium-sized blade servers and will include enterprise-level blade server data by mid-summer, said Jim Burton, the vice president and senior analyst for entry-level servers and blades at Ideas International.

The site lets users compare various components of the servers that fall under the umbrellas of platform functionality, environmental footprint, virtualization functions, reliability, serviceability and manageability, and deployment considerations.

The information is based on the hardware specifications, interviews with end users, and performance data, Burton said.

“We establish the appropriate ratings, but it is an open source-style website, so users can affect these ratings too,” Burton said. Of course, Ideas International give the user feedback a credibility rating, so only statements supported by concrete data can actually bring a rating up or down, he said.

The site is pretty handy if you are on the market for blade servers, especially because the site allows you to make comparisons based on your priorities. If you need power efficiency, you can compare boxes based on that alone. Same goes for factors like “green-ness,” cost, networking and so forth, said Burton.

Ideas International also has evaluation sites for x86 virtual machine platforms and plans to create evaluation sites for Unix-based systems and Linux in the near future, so keep an eye out for those.

Server packaging: It’s an issue. When you’re unloading dozens, if not hundreds, of servers, you have to take into account how many boxes are piling up and where they will go. Will they sit in the corner of your data center gathering dust? It’s a distinct possibility.

Which is why Dell has taken the offensive against Hewlett-Packard when it comes to the packaging of its blade servers. Dell claimed that ordering 16 blades from HP with the chassis can result in receiving 78 cardboard boxes. This compares to two boxes for 10 Dell blades.

Of course, this comparison was done by a report that Dell paid for, and so HP wasn’t going to sit on its haunches. It responded with a blog of its own talking about cardboard boxes, saying that customers have a “Factory Express” option that gets all the HP blades shipped in one box and that a “majority of HP BladeSystem customer solutions are shipped this way, in one box, not 78.”

Dell responded with another blog late last month saying that blade innovation is about more than cardboard boxes, essentially backing off its packaging claims but going after HP for having servers that suck up more power but perform worse than HP servers. Dell’s source for this claim? The same study it paid for that made the packaging claims. In any event, the back-and-forth has some readers tired, as exemplified by a comment on a Dell blog post:

This nitpicking of rival products sounds juvenile and is definitely not in good taste.

C’mon folks. Grow up and just focus your energy on making better products and allow your superior product features and healthy publicity to caputure the market, instead of resorting to such tactics. Surely we can do better than that.

Does server packaging matter to you, and how do you deal with it?

Hewlett-Packard this week introduced “Shorty,” a smaller blade chassis looking to capture the attention of smaller companies in a similar way that the BladeCenter S aims to. It’s 10.5 inches high, fits eight blades and can plug into a standard 110-volt wall outlet. All in all, it’s a pretty good mini-BladeSystem.

Called the c3000, the chassis has its own MySpace page. Seriously. It must be a way to get “them kids” excited, right? The page lists as its hero the HP BladeSystem c7000 and has this to say in the About Me section:

I prefer working with smaller businesses like this over larger corporations because you feel like you’re taking the world by storm together, all while perched atop a Web 2.0 platform. It’s nothing short of electric.

The chassis also has diverse music tastes: Johnny Cash, Modest Mouse, and The Roots are all on the list. As of Friday afternoon, the page had seven friends (including Tom), most if not all of which are public relations people.

First of all, MySpace? Everyone knows MySpace is old, man. Facebook is where it’s at. And what’s next? Maybe the chassis will sign up for a Twitter account — “just got shipped out of the warehouse” and “user sliding blades in, and oooh, it feels so good” will be the requisite entries.

It appears virtualization has officially become mainstream.

More than 10,000 people packed into the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the VMware Inc. sponsored VMworld conference. There were 147 sponsors and exhibitors this year, compared to 7,000 attendees and 82 sponsors and exhibitors last year.

There were also over 250 sessions and 100 hands-on labs to participate in, so choosing which to attend and write about for SearchDataCenter.com and SearchServerVirtualization.com was a bit overwhelming. Lots of the sessions were vendor run, with a few analyst and customer panel sessions thrown in.

A ton of new product news came out of VMworld as well, including VMware ESX Server 3i; AMD announced the new “Barcelona” quad-core processor; Cisco announced the VFrame-VMware Infrastructure integration; HP announced the new “Shorty” blade system; NetApp announced integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager; and Stratus/NEC announced new fault-tolerant server support for VMware Infrastructure that will ship in Q1 2008.

On day one, the keynote addresses came from VMware’s President and CEO Diane Greene, as well as Intel and AMD reps.

On day two, John Chambers,Chairman & CEO of Cisco Systems, Inc., talked about how virtualization in the data center is leading to better ROI for CEO’s concerned about bottom lines, and less headaches for CIO’s.

SearchServerVirtualization.com also announced the winners of the first annual “Best of VMworld” contest.

The final keynotes were delivered by Mendel Rosenblum and Diane Greene.

All in all, I thought it was a really good conference – tons of attendees, tons of products to check out, and high energy throughout.

Intel Corp. made an announcement today saying it is joining 40 other server technology providers in support of the new Server Systems Infrastructure (SSI) industry specification for modular server platforms. 

The group plans to ”lower the cost of product development by providing design guidance that enables server builders to develop compliant and interoperable building blocks at the blade, chassis and manageability software level.”

Microsoft is in the vendor mix, but some glaring ommissions  from the group are the industry giants; Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Dell.

In talking to these vendors in the past, I’ve learned they aren’t keen on standardizing blades.

As of today, users who buy blades are locked into that vendor because blades from different vendors have different “ecosystems,” and blades from one vendor will not fit into another vendor’s chassis.

This is a fact that won’t likely change anytime soon, according to IBM’s world wide marketing manager of IBM’s BladeCenter Scott Tease. “There has been a push toward standardizing blade chassis, but I don’t ever see that happening,” Tease said. “I couldn’t imagine IBM getting together with Dell and HP to share chassis. It is what makes each unique.”

I think SSI has an uphill battle when it comes to standardization.

Glenn Keels of Dell’s server team wrote an interesting blog about the blade market and how to use them in an efficient manner in data centers.

Keels said, “We believe a “Blade Everything” philosophy is not in the best interest of our customers.  In fact, we believe that applying that philosophy could actually increase IT complexity.”

There are some good points in this blog to consider if you are thinking about using blades, like the following:

“Wholeheartedly adopting blade servers would require some customers to build entirely new data centers with greater and different power sources such as 220V to each rack which isn’t standard in many data centers, and cooling capabilities.  That makes no sense.  Customers want to build their business not new data centers. ”

IBM today announced a new BladeCenter chassis — BladeCenter S — that holds six blade servers and storage, sits on your desktop, and can plug into a standard 110 volt wall outlet.

The new BladeCenter S chassis will be available in the fourth fiscal quarter; prices were not available. Executives said there won’t be specific blades built for this chassis — that existing ones will do fine. At least at first.

Although IBM thinks BladeCenter S would be good for branch offices, they’re also clearly targeting small businesses with the announcement, so look for some integrated offerings from IBM and its software partners once this gains steam in the late fall and early winter.

Sitting here at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Management Summit in Orlando, I may be drinking from a water bottle curiously labelled “Microsoft System Center” but I’m not “drinking the vendor Kool-Aid,” and neither are the Gartner analysts, at least when it comes to blade servers.

At a session this afternoon called “Blades and virtualization: Choose one, both or neither?,” John Enck, research VP at Gartner, started by telling us about his new allergy. He said he is highly allergic to the hype around blades. The headlines about blades and virtualization being the perfect marriage make him especially itchy.

“It isn’t a marriage I want to be engaged in,” he told amused attendees.

Enck made the session his forumn to save unsuspecting users from poor blade and virtualization invesments

“I am hearing from my clients that there is tremendous pressure from vendors like Hewlett-Packard to buy blades. I don’t know if this is warranted. I don’t care if the blade is from Sun or HP or whoever, they aren’t always the best answer.”

The same goes for virtualization. “Not all workloads are candidates for virtualization, and it isn’t always easy to determine which ones aren’t,” he said.

Other analysts slammed vendors for pushing products like management software suites that aren’t necessary, among other complaints.

Sure, users need vendors just as vendors need users (a.k.a profits), but it’s a refreshing delight — especially for a journalist who is always on the look out for vendor fluff — to see that the analysts here aren’t regurgitating hype or pushing products from vendors sponsoring the event.

At least as far as I can tell.

Server shipments were up in the first three months this year from the same fiscal quarter last year, according to research firms Gartner and IDC. Here’s the rundown:

• Server shipments were up 6 percent, according to Gartner; 4.6 percent according to IDC.
• Server revenues: Gartner says they were up 4.5 percent; IDC says 4.9 percent.
• Gartner said that IBM led in server revenue, followed by HP, Dell, Sun and Fujitsu. In server shipments, HP is followed by Dell, IBM, Fujitsu and then Sun.
• IDC’s numbers showed that HP led in revenue, followed by IBM, a tie between Sun and Dell, and then Fujitsu.

Though IDC’s server numbers differ from Gartner’s server numbers, the two came to basically the same conclusion: overall server numbers are up. Midrange systems were static overall, but mainframes, x86 and blade servers all improved.