Quocirca Reports | Quocirca Articles | Key Analysts | Questions & Answers
Blade Computing and the Public Sector
Blade computing is becoming a more important part of the IT Director's arsenal. Whilst often seen as a way of providing ‘servers in a different form factor', blade computing in fact offers significant benefits in flexibility and responsiveness to business needs as well as big savings in power, cooling and floor space. This paper looks at the particular challenges in public sector IT - the need to find efficiency savings at the same time as offering better service to citizens - and discusses the particular circumstances in which blade computing will be right for the public sector IT manager.
Key Findings

  • Public sector IT departments are no different from their private sector counterparts in being set up in ‘silos’ of different hardware, operating systems, applications and storage. This leads to inefficiency in usage – Quocirca research has shown CPU usage as low at 10% and storage utilisation only at 30%. The cost of managing this diversity only adds to the burden in an environment where significant efficiency gains are required to meet government targets
  • Blade computing offers significant benefits to the hard-pressed government IT manager: it consolidates infrastructure, reducing on-going management overheads; it gives potentially big savings in heat, power and floorspace; ‘plug and play’ installation of new hardware enables applications to be deployed or scaled up quickly; it allows quick and cost-effective means of providing processing power for complex data analysis and applications can be re-provisioned quickly to respond to urgent requests which require intensive data analysis
  • Pressure on public sector IT is more acute than ever: the range of applications is vast, the problem of ‘silos’ is as great if not more so than in the private sector, re-organisations are constant, the pressure on IT to contribute to savings and deliver improved services is immense and finally, the public service is about to be directly targeted to contribute towards the reduction of greenhouse emissions.
  • The move to a ‘shared services’ agenda – functions such as HR, Finance and IT being run by one body on behalf of others – means that datacentres are going to become bigger and will need to be able to respond quickly and efficiently to their various clients.
  • In this environment, blade computing offers many potential benefits to the public sector IT manager. The cost savings will of course be of interest to all across the public sector, including those who have outsourced IT and other business processes who should be looking to share a part of the cost savings that their suppliers will be benefiting from. 
  • In terms of benefits other than cost, particular areas of interest will be those where fast and flexible application implementation will bring about business efficiencies, those where data has to be available across organisations, where high levels of compute power are needed quickly and cost-effectively. Those organisations considering offering shared services to others will find the benefits of blade computing of even more interest.