Blade.org is making available a vendor neutral, member-driven study on server consolidation and workload optimization. The free white paper can be downloaded at http://www.blade.org/tech_hot_topics.cfm. Contributors from APC by Schneider Electric, Double-Take Software, Emulex, IBM and NetApp find consolidating older, less performing servers, storage and workstations with smaller, more efficient blade server systems can reduce costs and improve efficiency. But a high-density, virtualization-driven datacenter requires effective resource management software and efficient storage and I/O management to provide the highest possible benefit. In particular, power and cooling requirements demand system-level planning to support scalability, storage, backup, and networking requirements.

"As the industry faces down the twin challenges of delivering more IT services while simultaneously reducing IT budgets, Blade.org members are working to address the key technology trends that can enable datacenter managers to achieve their goals," said Brent Mosbrook, Senior Product Manager for Emulex Corporation and Chairperson of the Blade.org Solutions Architecture Committee. "This white paper is a result of collaboration among five Blade.org members and highlights server consolidation with a focus on key technologies and best practices deployment."

Key Highlights:

• Power & Cooling: Balancing the size of a datacenter versus the cooling requirements can greatly affect overall datacenter operational costs. Virtualization-based server consolidation must be balanced with dense power and cooling solutions that are localized to fit the workload.

• Blade Servers: Greatly reduce overall footprint and floor space, but demand higher performance I/O and storage connections.

• Virtualization: Virtualization software can enable 10x to 100x server consolidation but require higher performance hardware with greater processing power, memory, I/O bandwidth, and storage capacity to achieve intended performance goals.

• Site Consolidation: Best practices include automated machine provisioning and workload migration. Key technology hurdles in networking and storage connectivity, management of provisioning, and migration from physical to virtual deployments can be overcome with management software, resource planning tools and exploitation of new features in the latest virtualization software and I/O such as 10 GB Ethernet, iSCSI, FcoE and IP storage networks.

For more information about Blade.org, please visit http://www.blade.org.