IBM and HP are gearing up to put a blade server in every business datacenter -- including small-medium businesses. The sticking point to date has been the several thousand dollar cost of the blade chassis. The new programs seem to flip the cost equation around to the well-known razor and blade (pun intended) marketing approach. In this case, the proprietary chassis is the "razor".
Any business that needs more than a handful of servers (i.e., 50 employees and up) should consider migrating to a blade architecture on the next server buy. Blade architecture is a better way to house and manage racks of servers. Period. There are very few exceptions for 1-2 processor workloads.
Peter S. Kastner
Peter is right. Blades really are the way to go. The prices of chassis' are dropping and terms of sale are attractive enough that there is no excuse short of not needing them (now AND in the future) for going any other way. The time of discrete boxes is fading in the business market and I for one am glad of it.
ReplyDeleteJack