Blade Editorial: Data Center in a Box

Building a data center that can deliver information to decision makers quickly and is easy to manage is a simple matter of efficiencies. Both small businesses and large enterprises are looking to deploy powerful, cost-efficient and scalable data center solutions while reducing costs and complexity in the data center.

One way companies can reduce complexity in the data center is to deploy blade servers. Blade increases density in the data center, consolidating server and network capacity, unifying management and making resource virtualization possible.

Blades also share power and cooling components as well as network resources, consolidating routing, switching, I/P and other functionality; ultimately bettering the data center environment.

Looking beyond server consolidation, there is another opportunity to further alleviate cabling, power, space and cooling challenges in the data center: integrate switching and routing within the blade enclosure. Integrating switching and routing also simplifies configuration of the blade server system, reducing cabling and making it easier to manage. Security is also improved.

Perhaps the biggest benefit to integrating switching and routing within the blade enclosure is the environmental impact of network consolidations and the cost savings achieved through lower energy bills.

New advances in network communication and protocol can further enable consolidation, leading to even more cost cuts and simplification.

Combining the advances in blade architecture, the ability to integrate switching and routing directly into the blade enclosure and 10Gb Ethernet performance gives small businesses and large enterprises a reliable, scalable and cost efficient server environment that is able to handle new low-latency, high bandwidth applications.