Blade PCs: early days yet

Akhtar Pasha explores the prospects of large businesses deploying blade PCs to control TCO

As enterprise IT managers look to provide more secure, cost-effective desktop replacement solutions for their users, many are considering new alternatives to traditional PC-server architectures. One of the more promising options is that of blade PCs.

Emerging products like the HP and ClearCube blade PCs, Softricity SoftGrid, and VMware Workstation and ACE offer new models for virtualizing the desktop. [Refer to the box: Blade PC architecture].

Blade PCs are PCs that are housed in a blade chassis, residing in a rack and cabinet on the data center floor. A typical 42-unit rack can support up to 112-240 blades per rack (depending upon the manufacturer). Users then remotely connect their input-output devices to these blade PCs. Each blade has the complete complement of software required by the user including OS, applications and data. No local data is present; rather, everything is remotely delivered to the user via a

communication protocol such as Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) or HP Remote Graphics Protocol (RGS).

Can blade PCs succeed where thin clients failed

As of now HP is the only vendor selling blade PCs for virtualizing desktops in India. Although this technology is yet to make its presence felt, we found some early movers such as Tata Consulting Engineers that wanted to move to a centralized computing architecture which would give it control over the management of desktops and flexibility in architecture to move resources [processor, memory], redundancy and a chance to control power and cooling costs to help in going green. It has virtualized its desktops using HP blade PCs. An industry standard 42U rack can house 280 such PCs. TCE has been able to optimize availability and reduce desktop power consumption by a significant percentage with blade PCs that consume just 25 watts of power.

T John Group of Institutions (TJSBI) is yet another example. It faced the stiff challenge of mounting costs of having to replace and upgrade outdated hardware every four years. Underutilization of over 50% of the desktops and downtime resulting from virus attacks only added to its problems. It has deployed HP Blade PCs bc2500 and replaced the old PCs with vc4725 and t5630 thin clients for increased energy efficiency and data management. These thin clients improved the organization’s energy efficiency as they use almost 67% less energy when compared to traditional desktops. This was realized not only in energy costs but reduced air-conditioning costs and also the thin clients generate less noise. Other benefits include centralized data, application management and lower downtime.

A brokerage firm trading on the BSE and NSE has also bought HP blade PCs to virtualize its physical desktop infrastructure. The brokerage firm wanted a secure platform for trading and demanded a C/Port that connects to a blade PC using standard homerun cable up to 200 meters long, in addition to the standard I/Port which lets users connect to their Blade PCs over a standard Ethernet network that may include routers, switches and media converters. The C/Port is used for ultra-secure environments with direct connectivity to Blade PCs over a point-to-point cable connection.

HP’s other customers for Blade PCs include a defense establishment and a few BPOs.

Although there is no data available on the growth of blade PCs used for desktop virtualization, IDC has said that given the benefits offered by thin clients and blade PCs, the market opportunity for these devices is robust. IDC expects blade PC shipments to increase by nearly 150% on a worldwide basis by end 2010 and it expects worldwide shipments of just over 2 million units in 2010.

Deloitte has predicted that thin clients would be taken far more seriously in 2010 than they have been in previous years, even if they do not outsell conventional PCs and laptops. Rajarshi Sengupta, Senior Director, Deloitte & Touche Consulting, said, “Over the next five years, thin clients [including blade PCs] should reach 10% of an organization’s computers, with the majority of medium to large businesses considering a shift to virtual desktop infrastructure. We feel that blade PCs can help deliver direct savings by minimizing and making IT support and maintenance more efficient, as well as reducing hardware costs and licensing fees.” He added that there were other less tangible benefits to virtual desktop infrastructure including mobility, increased productivity, lower real estate costs, lower power consumption and better security. Those charged with deploying thin clients may need to convince workers who begrudge the lack of a local hard disk drive that the pure form of thin client entails. However, abetted by a slow recovery, employers may consider it a good opportunity to reshape working conditions.

The yes-no dilemma

Enterprise requirements for PCs and notebooks have grown significantly. Rajat Mehta, Country Category Manager–Remote Client Solutions, PSG, HP India, said, “In a distributed network, buying new PCs or upgrading PCs could be a risky proposition and a nightmarish experience in terms of managing the same. Additionally there is no easy way to roll out new branches (sizing hardware configuration and managing it) to quickly ramp up operations for large businesses. There are other factors that are challenging the traditional distributed computing architecture such as poor utilization of machines.” For example, demand for hardware resources fluctuate within large businesses and there could be instances where hardware resources are left lying idle while power users are stuck with underpowered PCs. Setting up a common framework for security policies and patch management for individual machines are tasks that are complex to execute.

Additionally IT managers in large businesses continue to face ongoing challenges when it comes to securing their enterprise, lowering operational expenses, and minimizing risk. Mehta said, “The risks and costs associated with PC support are one of the biggest problems. While acquisition costs for PCs continue to decline, support costs and TCO continue to escalate. Additionally frequent OS upgrades and patch management and anti-malware updates in conjunction with growing security risks and increasingly complex software environments are making it harder to keep PCs safe and up-to-date.” He continued that best practices for maintaining PCs were becoming so difficult that few organizations had the ability to sustain them, leading to the potential for open security holes that could end up costing organizations dearly.

Mehta said, “In addition to cost and security issues, many IT managers are on the lookout for computing architectures that offer the flexibility to dynamically adapt to changing demands in terms of performance, scalability, and robustness.” This desire for agility is considered critical by IT managers because they are now tasked with not only maintaining their IT infrastructure but also providing value to the business. Having an architecture that helps allocate computing resources as needed helps. For example, large businesses can segment regular task users performing simple repetitive tasks whose computing needs are relatively low. Then there are knowledge workers who have the broadest, most variable requirements—in the hour-to-hour utilization of resources it may vary from 10% to 80% in short durations based on the workplace productivity task at hand. The third category is power users, the most demanding user group, these individuals demand very high-performance computing devices and use a wide variety of high-performance applications. Blade PCs, which provide all the capabilities of a traditional PC but are housed in a data center are an important part of a potential grid computing solution for clients when put together with software that can dynamically allocate computing resources as needed.

According to Sengupta, thin clients existed 15 years back and have passed through the hype cycle and are ready for commercial deployment. “From a business standpoint, we see a tremendous opportunity for [Blade PCs today] especially in the KPO vertical. Large investment firms are offshoring their credit and risk analysis to KPOs in India. These KPOs are legally not supposed [as per contract] to store and keep any data pertaining to customers’ credit and risk analysis on local drives. Blade PCs are the perfect solution as they give KPO managers the ability to centrally manage virtual desktops without the fear of security breaches,” said Sengupta. Applying virus signatures and patches management become so much easier with blade PCs.

Shrimathi Ambastha (Seema), Director–Technology, VMware India and SAARC, said, “Desktop virtualization using the thin client model such as Blade PCs helps administrators control the cost of managing desktops, upgrades, virus control and in provisioning new users. Large customers can save power and cooling costs.” While there are VMware customers using desktop virtualization solutions, most of its deployments are on blade servers and not blade PCs.

Unlike other technologies, Blade PCs do not need upgrade/refresh in hardware spending for 10-15 years and the technology reduces your power and cooling window drastically. Mehta said, “Power supplied to PCs is generally 110 watts and would required additional resources such as power and air conditioning. Whereas with a blade PC enclosure, the power consumed would be one-fourth (25 watts).”

Sengupta added, “A blade PC brings about significant savings in OPEX with regard to power and cooling.”

Pilots in the pipeline, cost remains a challenge

HP said that it had at least 60-80 blade PC pilots in the ITES and BFSI verticals. Mehta said, “Generally for any central thin-client deployments, most businesses start small in pilots and once the benefits are proven to the management, the project is ready for rollout. Blade PCs are expected to follow the same path.”

Leo Joseph, Vice President–Systems x, STG, IBM India/SA, said, “While the concept of virtual client solutions has been around for quite some time [mostly thin clients], the emergence of blade PCs for desktop virtualization is quite new and unproven though it is common sense that it will bring about high availability and savings in the form of power and cooling costs. However, we do not see a big trend because of high deployment costs despite desktops being a commodity now. Security and computing come at prohibitive costs and this will limit the growth of blade PCs.”

Ashok Tripathy, General Manager & Head, Systems & Technology Division, Infrastructure Availability Services, Wipro Infotech, added, “Despite being involved in the one of biggest computerization contracts from the Employee State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) for deploying 31,000 NComputing virtual desktops, the traction for blade PCs for desktop virtualization is limited. Customers want to know what they can get from blade PCs before they try it out. Nevertheless customers are showing interest in thin clients, VDI and blade PCs.”

HP is not deterred. To increase the affordability of blade PCs for desktop virtualization it has introduced various finance options in an OPEX model through HP Financing. Mehta explained, “We are giving financial assistance to industries that want to deploy blade PCs. Under this scheme, large businesses can run their infrastructure for three to five years (and return the infrastructure to us if they are unhappy with the service) with no capital investment on a pay-per-seat model. In a single 2U rack, you can pack as many as 240 PCs. The thin clients at the front-end can connect to any blade PC dynamically. This gives you huge savings in terms of power and concurrent licensing. As far as the user is concerned, it’s a 100% PC like experience for him,” said Mehta.

As it turned out, the market for blade PCs for desktop virtualization remains quite small and nascent because of the lack of support from hardware OEMs. Secondly, the solution would appeal to a small section of the market namely KPOs and IT houses because of the huge CAPEX requirement. Thirdly, a software-based desktop virtualization option such as VDI is preferred over blade PCs because of the cost advantages.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com