Ten years ago, many customers wondered if rack-mounted or x86 servers should replace tower and proprietary servers. Today, the majority of units sold are rack-mounted x86 servers, while server blades represent the fastest-growing new segment of the market.

Why is the use of Blade Servers increasing so rapidly?
The blade server is the evolution of the entire rack-mounted infrastructure, aiming to simplify the management, building and maintenance of the infrastructure behind a multi-server environment. It creates a single platform through consolidating all the supporting elements - compute, storage, network and power and accelerating the integration and enhancement of the data centre.

What do Blades enable for you?

• Improve infrastructure manageability by keeping solutions secure, reliable, and consistent
• Automate more tasks to save administrative time and expense
• Streamline operating system, application and patch updates
• Capture best practices and reduce human error
• Improve performance, price/performance, and performance per watt
• Improve utilization of server, storage, network components and save space and power
• Reduce the number of cables required and the time spent managing cables in the data centre
• Build a more flexible and cost-effective modular

Is Blade technology right for your infrastructure?

Firstly, consider the application. Typically, any Linux or Windows application running on one, two or four processors, with x86-based technology, is ideally suited. A Blade system is also ideal for growing businesses, branch offices and remote sites.

If the application relies on clustering or a distributed, multi-tier environment requiring a large number of processors, a Blade system would also be advantageous.

Major reasons for adopting Blade technology:

• Over 20% less expensive on up front costs
• Over 80% less cabling, compared to conventional servers solutions
• Reduced time to implement changes, updates, and reconfigurations from 4 hours to 30 minutes
• Reduce space by more than 8 times
• Reduce average unplanned downtime and planned downtime by more than 50 percent

In most cases where more than five servers are considered, Blade should be the first platform evaluated for most Linux and Microsoft Windows applications, including consolidations, migrations and updates of existing applications, operating systems and aging hardware.