What is a blade - BladeSystem?

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Just what is a Blade?

A blade is literally a self-contained server, which collectively fits into an enclosure with other blades. Sometimes known as a chassis, this enclosure provides the power, cooling, connectivity, and management to each blade. The blade servers themselves contain only the core processing elements, making them hot-swappable. HP refers to the entire package as a BladeSystem.

To get a better idea of what a single blade contains, an HP ProLiant blade holds hot-plug hard-drives, multiple I/O cards, memory, multi-function network interconnects, and Integrated Lights Out remote management. For additional storage, blades can connect to another storage blade or to a network attached SAN.

When compared to other traditional rack-mount servers, a blade server can be dedicated to a single task, such as:

Database and application hosts
Virtual server host platforms
Remote desktop or workstations
File sharing
Web page serving and caching
SSL encrypting of Web communication
Transcoding of Web page content for smaller displays
Streaming audio and video content

In other words, blades can be whatever you need them to be. Use the blade savings of time, money, and energy costs to create a competitive advantage over your competitors. Explaining blades to the small business owner.

Benefits of blades

If your top priorities are space, power consumption savings, ease of scalability, cable reduction, hot-swapping, reliability, and redundancy, then buying a BladeSystem is something to consider.

By consolidating and housing multiple servers in a single enclosure, energy costs are significantly reduced. Read how Thermal Logic continuously monitors temperatures to ensure the optimum operating environment, which equates to cost savings.
Cabling becomes wire once to the enclosure and walk away. According to a SearchWinSystems.com article on server technology, enterprises moving to blade servers can experience as much as an 85% reduction in cabling for blade installations over conventional 1U or tower servers.
Read about Virtual Connect, which makes moving applications from one blade server to another in the enclosure while troubleshooting or adding a new application easy for anybody to do.
Since bladed storage can contain a large number of hard drives that fit into an enclosure, considerable footprint savings are achieved.
Don't forget networking capabilities are also bladed within this architecture.
Highly efficient management is through a single interface to all. Learn how Insight Software saves something everybody needs more of: Time.
Blades can be configured to support a single or multiple applications, and shifting these applications to meet particular business demands is a snap.
Virtualization further reduces footprint costs and creates a myriad of flexibility options.

To get the big picture of what components are involved in a blade architecture for your datacenter of any size, the Step-by-Step Guide to Build a BladeSystem will provide those. Maybe you'd prefer to first view blade product choices and options.

HP BladeSystem