Talking about blade servers

http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/News/8cc99675-66b4-493e-a837-fa9fc8d7738a.html

Blade servers may be attractive to companies seeking more computing power without needing more real esate. However, these devices generate more heat, raising the need for effective cooling solutions, said George Kong, vice president for ASEAN of APC-MGE, which specializes in the provision of power, cooling and management solutions for desktops, data centers and factory floors.

“The energy cost of maintaining the right environment to keep servers running far outweighs server costs alone,” Kong said. “Data centers need a precision cooling environment that allows servers to run at optimal speed without burnout.”

An interesting article which is talking about blade servers, power and cooling in the data center, do check it out. Blades might not be the solution for your business, and the energy/cooling issues remain. The debate of blade servers and their energy/cooling requirements is set to continue, ultimately their suitability for your business is going to depend on your data center, your core experience and openness to a new technology, as well as an understanding of the platform, your current and future requirements. They tend to be a more volume product, you would tend to look at buying a rack or half populated rack of blade servers, than buying two simply because of the related costs, the enclosure (integrated or pass through switches). It will be interesting to see where the blade platform goes in the near future and if certain regions adopt blade technology more quickly than others; we’ll have to see. Do check out the article.