Blades Have the Edge

by Jane Wright IEEE Spectrum, April 2005 The vast, labyrinthine computer room of Veritas DGC Inc. used to be a crowded, bustling place. Small groups of technicians would often hunker down there for hours in wired warrens formed by refrigerator-size racks housing more than 10 000 servers. The technicians worked day and night in that sprawling hive to keep all those machines up and running, processing the advanced geophysical and seismic models that are at the heart of Veritas’s business. These days, the oil industry consulting firm’s computer room is much quieter and less crammed, and the technicians spend considerably less time in the chilly computer room. Similar transformations are happening in computer rooms all over the world, and they are all the result of the same decision: to switch from conventional servers to blade servers. Read the article