Blade management software

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The growing market for blade servers is driving hardware and software vendors to deliver blade management products. For now, many users opt to manage servers with homegrown tools. Take Ramaswamy Aditya. He says the blade servers he bought from RLX Technologies are easier to manage than the 1U servers also running in his data center.

Aditya also uses an open source operating system called FreeBSD and Linux on the blade servers to perform out-of-band management. Corporate users want to monitor availability and performance, as well as spot potential hardware problems before they cause downtime.

Because blades are hot-swappable they can be a potential management problem. Corporate users must be able to quickly discover new blades, identify the proper configuration and allocate the necessary images to the blades. Because blades also serve as inexpensive options for branch offices or sit on the edge of the network, network executives must be able to administer blades remotely, which requires certain asset or desktop management capabilities.

And while many software vendors such as Computer Associates and BMC Software have tools to manage systems and servers, there are no standards to manage blades. Proprietary systems represent a challenge in managing across heterogeneous networks, but at this time, blades tend to work only with blades and chassis from the same vendor.

Management products for blades falls into one of four categories: change and configuration management; image cloning and management; provisioning; and policy-based management efforts. And each vendor seems to have its own method to manage blades. Yet, policy-based management, in which systems can automatically deploy predefined actions for configuration, security, provisioning and performance across servers and other networks elements - remains the ultimate goal for vendors and users.

One crucial difference between blades and traditional servers is volume - because of their space-saving character, there can be more blades in a smaller space for corporate users to manage. That's where automation can help, experts say. IBM and HP have begun their policy-based management under the guise of their autonomic computing and utility computing product road maps, respectively. The idea is that an intelligent infrastructure coupled with smart software will be able to reallocate storage, processing and network resources on the fly.

IBM Director includes client software that acts as agents running on the blades that deliver management information back to the server, which is a snap-in module on the back of the blade chassis.

When new enclosures are added to the environment, the same configuration can be applied instantly and repeated at scale. In addition, multiple configuration templates, that are optimized for different workloads, can be composed for later deployments. BNM is a software solution that can be deployed on any physical server or a virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux managed through a secured web interface. The BNM software framework is architected with open standards and is flexible to be incorporated into any existing infrastructure management software tools.

The BNM dashboard is designed to present the networking topology and configurations in the simplest fashion, the utility requires minimal networking knowledge. Setting up a new network switch in a fresh deployed blade enclosure requires only a few clicks in the BNM web interface.

The BNM management agent is scalable to manage up to thousands of SuperBlade and MicroBlade enclosures from a single management interface.