blade server

Ask your blade server questions at ITKnowledgeExchange.com

Blade servers allow more processing power in less rack space, simplifying cabling and reducing power consumption. 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. With so much less cabling, IT administrators can spend less time managing the infrastructure and more time ensuring high availability.

Each blade typically comes with one or two local ATA or SCSI drives. For additional storage, blade servers can connect to a storage pool facilitated by a network-attached storage (NAS), Fiber Channel, or iSCSI storage-area network (SAN). The advantage of blade servers comes not only from the consolidation benefits of housing several servers in a single chassis, but also from the consolidation of associated resources (like storage and networking equipment) into a smaller architecture that can be managed through a single interface.

A blade server is sometimes referred to as a high-density server and is typically used in a clustering of servers that are dedicated to a single task, such as:

• File sharing
• Web page serving and caching
• SSL encrypting of Web communication
• The transcoding of Web page content for smaller displays
• Streaming audio and video content

Like most clustering applications, blade servers can also be managed to include load balancing and failover capabilities.

Getting started with blade servers

To explore how the blade server is used in the enterprise, here is an additional resource:

All-in-One Guide: Data Center Disaster Recovery

Read more about blade server: - Learn on the go: Download our podcast: "What is a blade server? How can it help my small to mid-sized business?" - SearchSystemsChannel.com offers a comprehensive guide for blade server resellers. - In this article Matt Stansberry discusses heat issues in the data center. - Nexcom also makes blade servers and describes some applications.

Do you have something to add to this definition? Let us know. Send your comments to techterms@whatis.com

Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us

RELATED CONTENT Dell joins ranks of I/O virtualization providers with FlexAddress Dell's FlexAddress tool virtualizes switching for PowerEdge M-series blade servers much like HP Virtual Connect does, but at lower cost and without... HP puts fault-tolerant NonStop on a blade HP's new fault-tolerant Integrity NonStop servers may rival IBM's mainframe, with mainframe-level availability that's lower cost and more energy... HP intros RAM- and CPU- packed blade for cloud computing, HPC HP has introduced a new blade server with more CPU and RAM than its other blade server models for more intensive workloads and the cloud computing...

RELATED GLOSSARY TERMS Terms from Whatis.com − the technology online dictionary brick server  (SearchDataCenter.com) Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch 3020  (SearchDataCenter.com) The Cisco Catalyst Blade Switch 3020 is a switch designed for the Hewlett-Packard (HP) BladeSystem c-Class of blade servers... (Continued)