What are the benefits of Blade Servers on your network?
No matter the type of business or application, when you need a server, you have to choose from an extensive list of options. Finding the right way to design and maintain your servers is an undertaking. While you weigh your options, it’s worth your time to take a closer look at blade servers. They are designed to save space, but that description hardly does them justice. A quick review of the top five benefits of blade servers in data centers makes their value clear.
They Are Very Small
Blade servers were designed specifically to take up less space. To call them small might be an understatement. The average size of a blade server is around five inches by five inches, and they are the width of a circuit board.
They are made so small so that multiple servers will fit into a single enclosure, or chassis. Despite the size, you can group blade servers so that they provide more computational power per cubic foot of rack space than almost any other type of server.
They Scale Easily
One of the primary design philosophies behind blade servers is the modular design. You can add servers as you see fit, making it very easy to scale up computational power in a server rack. Blade boards can be added one at a time or multiple at a time.
Expansion slots make it easy to access modular upgrades, so the entire process can change as you go. You can scale up slowly or rapidly as business needs demand.
Setup Is a Breeze
Part of scalability is setup, and blade servers are much easier to set up than most other servers. There are two reasons.
First, blade servers can be packed into a single enclosure. This dramatically reduces the amount of cabling needed for any expansion. Once the chassis is in the server rack, adding new blade servers to the same chassis is a simple process.
The second advantage on this front is control. New servers can copy configurations from already installed servers. This prevents the need for complicated setup procedures every time a new server is added to the configuration.
They have Simplified Central Management
When you understand how blade servers are arranged physically, it comes as less of a surprise that they are centrally managed. With multiple servers in a single enclosure, it makes sense to manage them all through one interface.
Because of this arrangement, you can simultaneously manage every blade server in a chassis with a single set of inputs. Server management really doesn’t get simplified more than this, and it makes management much more efficient. System administrators can save a lot of time when they make use of blade servers.
They Are Power Efficient
One of the reasons blade servers have their design is to reduce power consumption. Since multiple servers are put into a single enclosure, there are fewer components required to run each individual server. That dramatically reduces the overall power draw from any one server.
Some would argue that blade servers are power-hungry, but that’s an oversimplification. With blade servers, you can pack a lot more computational power into a small space, so a single rack can ultimately draw more power using the blade setup. When you compare power costs per server or compare power-to-computation ratios, blades are quite efficient and save on power costs.
Blade servers have a lot to offer any data configuration. They are particularly popular in data centers where computational power is in high demand and space is limited. With modular design and intense scalability, it’s hard to overlook blade servers as a solution to many challenges that face data centers.
Cisco B200 M4 Server Blade with (2) Intel E5-2680v3, 256GB RAM, (2) 300GB 10K HDD
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