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Benefits of blade servers

What is the best benefit of a blade server?

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There are several so this is a toughy, and will really depend on how many you have and what your needs are for each. But in short, blade servers allow for a single management platform. People often overlook labor in their calculations for return on investment and total cost of ownership, but in the old days, patching 10 servers was awful. Blade servers make this much easier, as you can administer several servers within the same chassis without having to move cables or change KVM switch settings. They also allow for faster server-to-server communications, as they share a wire speed backplane instead of a network (wire speed means that the functionality happens in the hardware rather than software and is faster). I am told that the break-even point for a blade server is when you replace four regular servers. The rest is just savingss, even with other things considered.

Editor's Note: For more information, see Carrie's blog entry on benefits of blade servers.

This was first published in February 2006

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