Solutions using Blades

Solving data center challenges is clearly on the minds of IT professionals globally. Data center must be high performance, reliable, efficient and as scalable as services demands- without disruption- and easily managed from anywhere at any time.

Finally, solutions must satisfy adherence to regulatory and compliance guidelines. There are few solutions that address the challenges as effectively as modular bladed architectures. These architectures consolidate computing and I/O components into smaller modular form factors.

They share common resources, such as power, cooling and management, while lowering costs, using less space, andreducing overall complexity. Generally referred to as ?blades?, these architectures can satisfy data center requirements for desktops, servers, networking and storage.

Countless data center professional have found that blades provide world-class IT solutions. The blade server form factor emerged in early 2002 in the form of Transmeta powered server blades from a startup company in Texas called RLX Technologies. The RLX blade server design was originally targeted at web hosting and used Transmeta Crusoe processors. When considering a consolidation move to blade server technologies, proper planning and preparation goes a long way.

Systems that are properly architected from the outset require less effort to scale later. The second level is the virtualization layer, which is formed when virtualization software is added on top of blade server hardware to form a powerful solution.

Although initial or partial blade implementations can be more expensive, costs can be justified and recouped over time in several ways:

• Blade servers share common chassis, power supplies, networking and cooling, they require a lot less power than traditional servers
• The density that comes that comes from hardware's small form factor, resulting in more efficient use of data center facility space that is costly to build and maintain
• The ease of deploying, monitoring and managing blades, the technology offers a powerful ROI story to the CFOs