Notice how IBM, Dell, Rackable, and Dell’s high efficiency cloud infrastructure servers are not blade enclosures? Maybe it’s because HP’s data center design group who creates solutions like this

are figuring out how inefficient blades are for Cloud Computing. Quoting HP’s press release.

With the HP ProLiant SL portfolio, customers can cut acquisition costs by 10 percent and power draw by 28 percent, while doubling their compute density.⁽²⁾

“Customers with scale-out business models need solutions that make every dollar, watt and square foot in the data center count,” said Christine Reischl, senior vice president and general manager, Industry Standard Servers, HP. “The HP ProLiant SL offers pioneering customers like these the most significant design innovation since the blade form factor, allowing them to achieve an economy of scale never before possible.”

And, HP includes an IDC quote.

“Businesses built on extreme scale-out environments, such as cloud, Web 2.0 and HPC, operate at maximum transaction volume and low margins,” said Michelle Bailey, research vice president, IDC. “These customers have very distinct and unique data center requirements, specifically around energy efficiency, cost and time to market. The introduction of technology solutions such as the ExSO portfolio from HP are specifically addressing customer requirements for optimizing capitol expenditures while lowering ongoing operating costs. As a result, these solutions are helping to redefine data center economics.”

The problem with blades is high density computing created hot spots with problems airflows. But, this behavior to use blades was driven by chargeback models that used rackspace occupied. Which artificially can bring down IT costs when in reality it increases costs. Just read the above quotes again, on how these latest servers are the most efficient.

Note in this picture how the removal of a Proliant SL is similiar to a what a blade removal picture would be.

One great thing about Sun, HP, Dell, and IBM all getting into the data center design business is these companies are learning what the impact is of their hardware.

Wow think about this. For the first time many Server OEMs are building data centers to host their hardware, and they need to build hardware that works best in their data centers. Whoever can create the most efficient systems has a competitive advantage.

This is what Google does.

There is a new competition in data centers, and has a higher probability of a green data center.

Hey this will make a great white paper/presentation.