The newest idea in server technology offers an outstanding combination of performance, flexibility, and ease of maintenance. Blades, and the IBM BladeCenter offered by Key, may be the perfect solution for organizations short on technical personnel and short on space.
“Blades” are thin, individual servers that fit side-by-side into a single chassis, just like books on a shelf. Each blade has its own processors, memory, storage, network controllers, operating system and applications. But they share the same fans, floppy drives, switches, ports, and power supply, which are all located in the chassis.
Each Blade |
Chassis – components shared by all blades |
Processor |
Power |
Memory |
Fans |
Storage |
Floppy drives |
Applications |
Switches |
Network controllers |
Ports |
Operating system |
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The advantages are significant:
- Hot-swappable blades contribute to greater overall network reliability, high availability, easier and faster maintenance.
- Cabling – and the time needed to manage it – is dramatically reduced, which is a boon to small, understaffed, or overstretched IT departments
- The blade-and-chassis system fits more servers into a far smaller space, and uses less power, than conventional servers
- IBM BladeCenter Standby Capacity on Demand gives you extra power when you need it to respond to business challenges.
- Blades are cost-effective and flexible, with a wide variety of options for functionality and expansion.
The best-of-breed products offered by Key include IBM blades that support Linux, Novell, Microsoft® Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2000 operating systems. IBM BladeCenter architecture is based on industry standards to support third-party software. That makes it easy to migrate to this exciting new server technology.
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