The Development of Blade Servers

Blade servers are ultra-thin enterprise-level cases that can house one or multiple CPUs and massive quantities of memory. They're packed into tighter tolerances than typical 1U server designs, and each blade is hot-swappable, which means they can be used with servers that need to run high-availability applications. The most distinctive benefit of blade server deployment is the consolidation of resources: Storage and networking equipment is shoe-horned into a blade server chassis, which contains a single management interface. This paves the way for higher productivity and a better leveraged IT infrastructure.

The construction of a blade server is vastly different from the construction of a common rack-mountable server: Blades are more dense and compact, and key components (for example, power, networking, storage) are separate. Rack-mounted servers are generally self-contained, including power supply and drive storage (except for those that strictly use external storage volumes). Compaq is generally credited with the delivery of the first blade server products in 2000, but other players in this market (IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and others) all delivered similar products so soon after the first such offering appeared that they all must have had products in development during the same timeframe.

Today, blade servers are the preferred form factor for use in environments where high-traffic and high-demand applications and services are in use. No other approach permits as high a density of processing power in the same volume as a full-size blade server enclosure, fully populated with disk drives and other peripherals, as well as a complete complement of blade server cards. Nevertheless, standalone servers continue to be popular and widely used, particularly in small- to medium-sized businesses where high-cost, high-density blade server implementations may be overkill or too expensive to consider.