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The Greening of IT
102 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

A blade server is a chassis housing that contains multiple, modular elec-
tronic circuit boards (blades), each of which includes processors, memory,
storage, and network connections and can act as a server on its own. The thin
blades can be added or removed, depending on needs for capacity, power,
cooling, or networking traffic. The products, which are designed for high-
density computing, can provide a host of benefits to organizations, including
more efficient use of space and energy.
Blade servers provide a broad, modular platform that works well for con-
solidation as well as building for the future. Blades provide an opportunity
for a reduction in complexity by reducing the number of IT components, due
to shared components in the architecture. There should be greater managea-
bility, modularity, and flexibility for growth. These all help in reducing total
cost of ownership (TCO). With blades, you also provide a good modular
platform for the future architecture that supports things like I/O, virtualiza-
tion, and ease of provisioning. Blades should be considered a good hardware
counterpart to virtualization software.

The Benefits of Blades ptg
One of the key IT goals of many organizations today is to economize on
space, power, and cooling in the data center. In general, blade servers provide
a smaller form factor and a better footprint than other types of servers, so
organizations can make better use of their data centers. There has definitely
been a greater need for this type of technology as energy costs continue to go
up. Other benefits of blade servers are more specific to individual manufac-
turers. For example, some suppliers provide strong management tools. The
blade server devices include cutting-edge technology that enables companies
and their IT staffs to address fundamental data center challenges, such as
cost, change, time, and energy, to achieve better business outcomes. Blade
servers are flexible in terms of expansion and management, which is a great
benefit for administrators. Blades can also be used in a complete blade system
to bring together technologies like virtualization, automation, energy effi-
ciency, and unified management.
Blade servers are available from many vendors, including Hewlett-
Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. Sales of blade server technology accel-
erated in the 2007 to 2008 time period, according to research firm IDC.
Overall, blade servers, including x86, Explicit Parallel Instruction
Computing (EPIC), and Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) blades,
currently account for only a little more than 5 percent of server market