Description: Blade servers offer density, flexibility and versatility, and soon they could be affordable too.
One of the latest new trends in designing your server room is using blade servers. Now a lot of people are used to using these big tower boxes that had their own disk drives in them and they had their own network connections going in at the back and it was a big tower box and it sat on your floor and it was hard to keep track of. Well, now they're replacing them with these giant enclosures and inside the enclosures, you put these things called blades. Now each blade is just like a razor blade, going into the razor blades holder is having several different pieces of technology on it. It may have four processors and may also have a couple of disk drives on it, scuzzy disk drives, as a matter of fact.
Blades are so flexible and so versatile that the idea is that you can fit maybe as many as 100 or more into one enclosure, taking up the same space that like three towers took before. They call that density, when you can pack many more blades, well many more servers on to the same amount of floor spaces as used to only be able to pack like five servers. That means your density goes up. But the big question is: is it worth the cost, because as it turns out, the blades from most manufacturers come at a premium. It costs you way more money than these tower PCs. You have to really look at the fine print and do your math and plug it over to a spreadsheet to figure out whether the gain in density is actually worth the added expense.
Now, Dell Computer has been trying to change that. They're trying to say, hey look, you can have the added density and we'll even give you more density than everybody else, including Hewlett Packard and IBM and Egenera and these other guys will make blade servers, and we do it for less money instead of more money, the premium that could be as like IBM are charging an Egenera and HP. Dell are saying, look over here folks, this thing here, less money than this thing over here. If it's a lot more blades in the same space that it would take to put like only three or four tower service, but it costs less money instead of more money, all the other guys are charging more money.
Dell is using its supply-chain technology to bring the prices down on service and you know what happens, when Dell puts pressure on IBM and HP and they force them to lower the prices. They shift their entire operation off to China.
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