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The Buzz About Blades

Bigger isn't always better. In the world of complex computing, demand is growing for smaller products that trim costs while conserving energy and space.

However, businesses aren't always willing to trade size for flexibility, availability and modular scalability. Instead, they're looking for great things in small packages. A blade server is one such product.

Blade Basics
A blade server is basically an entire server that fits on a single card, or blade, and contains the CPU, memory and networking components necessary to run applications.

This blade is plugged into a single chassis that can accommodate more than 20 servers in the space previously occupied by one traditional server. The result is a more cost-effective, high-density, high-performance architecture that's been capturing much attention recently.

"The idea is analogous to books on a shelf," explains IBM's Jeff Benck, director of eServer product marketing. "The servers come on cards that are mounted vertically in a chassis or enclosure, in the same manner that books might slide onto a shelf. The chassis provides power, cooling, networking and storage, and it provides functionality to the blades."

The blade-server technology creates an infrastructure that allows companies to deploy multiple servers using shared resources. "This allows you to get a better feature set in a smaller amount of space," says Rob Sauerwalt, senior product manager of blade architectures at IBM. "The most comparable independent discrete or rack-optimized server class would be a 1U type server. Still, the blade server offers twice the density of our most dense rack-optimized server, plus better performance, better scalability and better availability features. It's a real more for less architecture."

 

Along with the improved physical integration with this technology, blades put the networking, storage and servers inside a single chassis, as opposed to other servers in which these components are external and must be wired together.

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