Blade PC
Encyclopedia
A blade PC is a form of client or personal computer
(PC). In conjunction with a client access device (usually a thin client
) on a user's desk, the supporting blade PC is typically housed in a rack enclosure, usually in a datacenter or specialised environment. Together, they accomplish many of the same functions of a traditional PC, but they also take advantage of many of the architectural achievements pioneered by blade server
s.
, RAM
and a hard drive. It may or may not have an integrated graphics sub-system. Some can support multiple hard drives. It is in a “blade” form that plugs into an enclosure. Enclosures offered by current blade PC vendors are similar but not identical. Most have moved the power supplies, cooling fans and some management capabilities from the blade PC to the enclosure. Up to 14 enclosures can be placed in one industry standard 42U rack
.
Blade PCs support one or more common operating systems (for instance Microsoft has created a “blade PC” version of their XP and Vista Business operating systems). Importantly, these solutions are intended to support one user per discrete device. This is a major difference from server-based computing, which supports multiple users simultaneously using an application hosted on one discrete server (be it a discrete piece of hardware or a discrete virtual machine
on a server).
Access to the device is usually achieved via Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol
(RDP), which allows users to log on to the blade PC via a client device (usually a thin client
). Once logged on the end user experience is largely the same as if they were logged on to a local PC. It is less effective at delivering multimedia, in part because the audio and video are not synchronized, so in circumstances where there is increasing latency, there is a proportional decrease in the quality of the end user experience. Improvements in this area have been made with RDP Version 7.0 which was released to manufacturing July 2009 and is included with Windows Server 2008 R2, as well as with Windows 7. There are other protocols available with various advantages and disadvantages relative to MS RDP. All protocols, it should be noted, are negatively impacted by increasing latency between the end user’s access device and the blade PC. One of the biggest challenges the blade PC vendors have experienced is how to minimize the impact of latency and deliver an end user experience comparable to that offered by a traditional PC, and there has been a number of new entrants in this sub-category of the blade PC in 2007.
International Data Corporation
recognizes blade PCs as a category separate from other types of PCs and has begun issuing forecasts for blade PCs.
, a small privately held company based in Austin, Texas
, gets credit for creating and popularizing the category. Started in the late 1990s, they have been very aggressive promoting the concept especially in the United States and in vertical markets such as financial traders, hospitals and national defense organizations.
HP
was second to the category with the 2004 announcement of their “Consolidated Client Infrastructure” in North America. In contrast to ClearCube, HP emphasized density while minimizing power consumption, which resulted in the ability to put far more blade PCs in an industry standard 42U rack (up to 280). HP’s first offering, however, was a Transmeta-based solution, which offered only a marginal end user experience. HP has since migrated to AMD-based blade PCs. Like the other blade PC vendors, HP offers MS RDP with their solutions, and they have announced availability of another protocol called Remote Graphic Software that has some advantages over MS RDP, especially in regard to delivery of three-dimensional and streaming content.
Hitachi
offers a blade PC of their own in Japan. It is reportedly only available in Japan. There does not seem to have been any enhancements since it was first introduced in 2005. Though more like the CCI solution than the ClearCube solution, it is less dense and has all cabling out of the front of the unit.
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
(PC). In conjunction with a client access device (usually a thin client
Thin client
A thin client is a computer or a computer program which depends heavily on some other computer to fulfill its traditional computational roles. This stands in contrast to the traditional fat client, a computer designed to take on these roles by itself...
) on a user's desk, the supporting blade PC is typically housed in a rack enclosure, usually in a datacenter or specialised environment. Together, they accomplish many of the same functions of a traditional PC, but they also take advantage of many of the architectural achievements pioneered by blade server
Blade server
A blade server is a stripped down server computer with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Whereas a standard rack-mount server can function with a power cord and network cable, blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power...
s.
Description
Like a traditional PC, a blade PC has a CPUCentral processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
, RAM
Ram
-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
and a hard drive. It may or may not have an integrated graphics sub-system. Some can support multiple hard drives. It is in a “blade” form that plugs into an enclosure. Enclosures offered by current blade PC vendors are similar but not identical. Most have moved the power supplies, cooling fans and some management capabilities from the blade PC to the enclosure. Up to 14 enclosures can be placed in one industry standard 42U rack
19-inch rack
A 19-inch rack is a standardized frame or enclosure for mounting multiple equipment modules. Each module has a front panel that is wide, including edges or ears that protrude on each side which allow the module to be fastened to the rack frame with screws.-Overview and history:Equipment designed...
.
Blade PCs support one or more common operating systems (for instance Microsoft has created a “blade PC” version of their XP and Vista Business operating systems). Importantly, these solutions are intended to support one user per discrete device. This is a major difference from server-based computing, which supports multiple users simultaneously using an application hosted on one discrete server (be it a discrete piece of hardware or a discrete virtual machine
Virtual machine
A virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". Modern virtual machines are implemented with either software emulation or hardware virtualization or both together.-VM Definitions:A virtual machine is a software...
on a server).
Access to the device is usually achieved via Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol
Remote Desktop Protocol
Remote Desktop Protocol is a proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft, which provides a user with a graphical interface to another computer. The protocol is an extension of the ITU-T T.128 application sharing protocol. Clients exist for most versions of Microsoft Windows , Linux, Unix, Mac OS...
(RDP), which allows users to log on to the blade PC via a client device (usually a thin client
Thin client
A thin client is a computer or a computer program which depends heavily on some other computer to fulfill its traditional computational roles. This stands in contrast to the traditional fat client, a computer designed to take on these roles by itself...
). Once logged on the end user experience is largely the same as if they were logged on to a local PC. It is less effective at delivering multimedia, in part because the audio and video are not synchronized, so in circumstances where there is increasing latency, there is a proportional decrease in the quality of the end user experience. Improvements in this area have been made with RDP Version 7.0 which was released to manufacturing July 2009 and is included with Windows Server 2008 R2, as well as with Windows 7. There are other protocols available with various advantages and disadvantages relative to MS RDP. All protocols, it should be noted, are negatively impacted by increasing latency between the end user’s access device and the blade PC. One of the biggest challenges the blade PC vendors have experienced is how to minimize the impact of latency and deliver an end user experience comparable to that offered by a traditional PC, and there has been a number of new entrants in this sub-category of the blade PC in 2007.
International Data Corporation
International Data Corporation
International Data Corporation is a market research and analysis firm specializing in information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology. IDC is a subsidiary of International Data Group...
recognizes blade PCs as a category separate from other types of PCs and has begun issuing forecasts for blade PCs.
History and vendors
ClearCubeClearCube
ClearCube is a computer systems manufacturer based in Austin, Texas, best known for its blade PC products. Founded in 1997 by Barry Thornton as Vicinity Systems, the company has been called "the blade PC pioneer" by The Register, and "the long-standing leader in the blade PC hardware arena" by...
, a small privately held company based in Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
, gets credit for creating and popularizing the category. Started in the late 1990s, they have been very aggressive promoting the concept especially in the United States and in vertical markets such as financial traders, hospitals and national defense organizations.
HP
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
was second to the category with the 2004 announcement of their “Consolidated Client Infrastructure” in North America. In contrast to ClearCube, HP emphasized density while minimizing power consumption, which resulted in the ability to put far more blade PCs in an industry standard 42U rack (up to 280). HP’s first offering, however, was a Transmeta-based solution, which offered only a marginal end user experience. HP has since migrated to AMD-based blade PCs. Like the other blade PC vendors, HP offers MS RDP with their solutions, and they have announced availability of another protocol called Remote Graphic Software that has some advantages over MS RDP, especially in regard to delivery of three-dimensional and streaming content.
Hitachi
Hitachi
Hitachi is a multinational corporation specializing in high-technology.Hitachi may also refer to:*Hitachi, Ibaraki, Japan*Hitachi province, former province of Japan*Prince Hitachi and Princess Hitachi, members of the Japanese imperial family...
offers a blade PC of their own in Japan. It is reportedly only available in Japan. There does not seem to have been any enhancements since it was first introduced in 2005. Though more like the CCI solution than the ClearCube solution, it is less dense and has all cabling out of the front of the unit.
Comparison
Common value proposition of blade PCs relative to traditional PCs:- Enhanced data security because all data can be maintained in the datacenter and can more easily be saved to a mass storage device, so if the access device is stolen or destroyed the data is not compromised
- Reduced Total Cost of Ownership due to consolidation, standardization, and more redundancy
- Better disaster tolerance for end users because with MS RDP end users can log in from anywhere to their blade PC, so even if their office is quarantined (due to a contagious disease outbreak, for instance), they can continue to have access to their blade PC and their data files so they remain productive
Design considerations
As an alternative to traditional PCs, the blade PC solutions offered by the various vendors are effectively competing with PCs, albeit they are based in datacenters. Therefore some of the more important design considerations in this category include:- Maximizing the end user experience (this is a “ticket” to entry – end user experience must be comparable to at least low-end traditional PCs)
- Minimizing acquisition cost (as a result traditional PC components are frequently used rather than more expensive server components)
- Maximizing density (because if these devices are to replace millions of traditional PCs by moving into datacenter they must minimize the amount of expensive datacenters space they require)
- Minimizing power consumption (minimizing power input and heat output in a datacenter is critical to keeping data centers properly cooled and datacenter costs down - see HVACHVACHVAC refers to technology of indoor or automotive environmental comfort. HVAC system design is a major subdiscipline of mechanical engineering, based on the principles of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer...
) - Similar to traditional PCs to deploy and integrate (ease of integration is critical, or the barriers to adoption will prohibit widespread success for the category)
- Easy to manage with the same tools used for other datacenter based HW and SW (otherwise it becomes onerous extra work)
Related client solutions
- Blade workstation: These solutions tend to be much more expensive than the traditional blade PCs, and befitting their more high-end specs, they are much more capable.
- Virtual PC: Unlike blade PCs, some vendors of virtualization software (such as ESXVMware ESX ServerVMware ESX is an enterprise-level computer virtualization product offered by VMware, Inc. ESX is a component of VMware's larger offering, VMware Infrastructure, and adds management and reliability services to the core server product...
from VMwareVMwareVMware, Inc. is a company providing virtualization software founded in 1998 and based in Palo Alto, California, USA. The company was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2004, and operates as a separate software subsidiary ....
) have recently popularized the idea of using a hypervisorHypervisorIn computing, a hypervisor, also called virtual machine manager , is one of many hardware virtualization techniques that allow multiple operating systems, termed guests, to run concurrently on a host computer. It is so named because it is conceptually one level higher than a supervisory program...
such as ESX to create multiple Virtual MachineVirtual machineA virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". Modern virtual machines are implemented with either software emulation or hardware virtualization or both together.-VM Definitions:A virtual machine is a software...
s (VM) that sit on top of the hypervisor, and load a client operating system in each VM. The goal then is to maximize the number of users per server to minimize acquisition cost while not so compromising the end user experience to make it too poor to use. So unlike the blade PC solutions described above, in a virtualized model all end users share the underlying hardware resources.