Indian firms test AMD-based blades

Advance Micro Devices' now famous rivalry with its larger competitor, Intel, has reached India even at the expensive end. An AMD executive said, Indian enterprise customers are testing blade servers based on AMD's Opteron processors.

"These are all companies you know," said Mukund Ramaratnam, director of marketing and business development at the company's subsidiary, AMD Far East Limited (India), declining to name the customers.

However, Ramaratnam said, the oil and gas exploration sector was a prime candidate for large server power, including blades. The sector dealt with large amounts of seismic data that had to be processed fast. AMD was also working with software vendors like Veritas who supply software to the oil and gas sector, he said.

Such software programmes could use Opteron-based blades and/or clusters for "hi-performance computing applications" that process large amounts of data.

This was also happening concurrently with a "migration to Linux, a popular open source operating system", to deliver better so-called "total cost of ownership to customers," he said.

The government sector, financial services and manufacturing are other verticals where blades are relevant. Firms that use large enterprise resource planning software such as SAP are also candidates.

"Opteron based servers match the best benchmarks for SAP and Oracle," Ramaratnam said.

Blade servers are modular, stacking up like books on a shelf and allow users to put more blades into the same chassis when required. At a typical price of Rs 1 lakh for a single blade, the servers may not be cheap, especially since most buyers wouldn't think of buying single blades.

But, say vendors, blades offer flexibility and other long-term advantages: Blades share the same chassis (including backplane, fans and input/output) so save floor space, reduce cabling and provide management flexibility.

Boosting AMD's bid to enter the blade market, original equipment makers such as IBM, HP and SUN announced earlier this year they would sell blade servers using the Opteron, the first so-called x86 chip to run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications.

IDC, a market research firm, expects blade sales to notch up a billion dollars this year. By 2007, IDC expects blades to account for a quarter of all server sales.

In calendar year 2004, some 80,000 servers were sold in India and blades almost didn't figure in that.

However, starting last year, IBM, HP and Dell have all brought some of their blade servers to the Indian market, running on Intel's chips. This year, with the exception of Dell, most major OEMs have started offering AMD-based servers as well.