Duck The Rhetoric And Catch Dell’s Latest Blade Salvo

The blade server makers are at it again. One can’t seem to announce a new product without everyone firing their competitive guns full blast. Dell is the latest with its new M-Series blade servers. This announcement has the usual foot soldiers: new dense form factor, simpler setup and administration, new feeds and speeds, aggressive pricing, comparison check lists and yet another “independent study” showing that Dell blades deliver 29% more performance/watt than the competition.

It also has the innovative new metric others will have to respond to. I thought this one was rather creative: the new Dell M-Series blades spew less CO₂ than competitors – so much less that we can live with 4 acres less pine trees per year without burning up the planet! Good news since the developing world continues to slash more forests than we can plant.

While customers certainly need comparatives to help determine the value of a new solution, the blade vendors take this element of marketing to OK Corral levels. Where else, than on HP, IBM and Dell’s blade web sites can you see competitive bashing highlighted so prominently?

Enough already. HP’s C-Class isn’t the competition for the new Dell M-Series. The status quo is. And that’s a room full of Dell rack and tower servers (according to Forrester Business Technographics only 28% of enterprises and SMBs are buying blades and an overwhelming majority buy from their dominant server vendor). Blade systems are far more efficient server solutions that can accelerate reaching IT consolidation goals and drive down overall data center costs. The vendors’ focus should be on encouraging their own customers to move up to blades, not worry whether they’ll jump ship for the competitor’s blade offerings.

The issues to focus on are customer education and overcoming the objections to these -- let’s face it -- proprietary offerings. Once you buy into one vendor’s chassis, you’re committing to their server blades for the long haul.

If anything good comes from this battle it’s better products at better prices. But the blade wars drain significant energy and marketing money (not to mention all the trees their marketing departments are cutting down to attack each other) away from the real battle, thus keeping blades a minority of server shipments. In an era where IT consolidation is actively being pursued by more than 80% of all enterprises, this is disappointing, as today’s blade servers are the best yet.

By James Staten.

Check out James' research.

Comments

[Frank]

I still don't see it. Blades need a killer app for them to take off, bottom line is it is too expensive to build out the facilities infrastructure to get into blades on a large scale. Not to mention the cost of entry into the blade environment. The low cost of the 1U and 2U servers in 1999 created a server proliferation storm that the industry had never seen before. Virtualization is stemming the tide. It may be that blades may cause the same proliferation. What good is taking an old 1U server running at 15% and replacing with a blade running at 5%. The virtual server train is still cruising along and the benefits are truly measurable. Maybe desktop virtualization on blades will be that killer app.... although rapid transit still can't separate drivers from their cars.