Why blades are good for business

http://bladenation.typepad.com/blade_nation/

Blade servers — they’re named after the easily replaceable working part of a razor blade, or a readily accessible sword in its sheath… And, they’re relatively new entrants into high-volume, mainstream data centers and server farms, but by no means are they a new thing. They’ve been around the telecom and other industries for years. A simple view of a blade server is to say they’re “all in one” servers, housed within a chassis along with switches, power supplies, management hardware, storage, etc. This allows blades servers to be vertically oriented, like books on a book shelf.

An excellent introduction to what a blade is, do check it out, it also discusses the 7 major benefits of blade technologies.  They can be used for server consolidation, virtualization or as a smaller form factor server. They do require a significant amount of power, but used appropriately in your organization the power and cooling issues can be offset by how you can be using them. 

Imagine taking all those separate DL380’s, 360s that are web servers, and creating a web farm, allowing you to have a scalable web infrastructure, sudden requirement for new web capacity? Add or re-allocate another blade, with the altiris build mechanism it could be ready in hours not days.

For Grid they remain an effective calculation tool due to their small form factor and dual power cpus, with that in mind, they could be put to use as effective ESX servers, you might only get 4 virtual sessions to one blade, but in a rack of blades that 7u or 8u allocated, might give you 64 virtual machines, possibly more expensive than a DL585, but their higher volume offsets this.