Integrator Toolbox: Think small, save big with blade servers

What's the big deal about blade servers? Everything's smaller, from the size of the servers, to the number of cables and wires cluttering up the back of a rack, to the time required for setup and management and, at least in some cases, in the amount of power consumed.At the simplest level, blade servers are on a single card that plug into a rackmount chassis. They're hot-swappable. Just slide them into the chassis, and they're up and running in seconds with a minimum of fuss. Hundreds of blades can fit into a very small space.Blade servers are cost-effective because they eliminate many of the complications of rackmount designs and pack a lot of computing power into small spaces. You need less technical expertise than with other servers, and they help eliminate annoying cable clutter.The term blade server typically refers to a proprietary chassis that can hold a number of blades that act as independent servers. For example, IBM Corp.'s eServer BladeCenter is a 7U chassis that can hold up to 14 server blades for up to 84 high-end servers in the rack. For large, enterprise-class workloads, choose blade systems with high-end, dual chipsets; quads aren't yet available, though Hewlett-Packard Co. will release the ProLiant BL40p later this spring.