With the IBM BladeCenter, small to large customers can run their business solutions on a tightly integrated and highly optimized all in one platform. Blade servers are not new, they’ve been around the telecom and other industries for years but over the years they’ve been evolved with many new technologies. A simple view of an IBM blade server is to say they’re “all in one” servers, housed within the innovative redundant IBM BladeCenter chassis architecture. Every blade server is placed vertically into the chassis so you can gain superior density.   In the chassis, you can easily put different BladeCenter hardware components to fulfill your business and datacenter needs.  Examples are network and storage switches, power supplies and management hardware.

Blade servers have captured industry focus because of their modular design, which can reduce cost with a more efficient use of valuable floor space, and its simplified management, which can help to speed up such tasks as deploying, reprovisioning, updating, and troubleshooting hundreds of blade servers. In addition, blade servers provide improved performance by doubling current rack density. By integrating resources and sharing key components, not only are costs reduced, but also availability is increased.

The most important and famous benefits of BladeCenter’s are:

• Density: the physical orientation of blade servers and modules within the chassis results in very efficient use of space


• Cable management: as the number of traditional-form-factor servers increases, the number of cables required for power, networking, kvm and management increase linearly. A full rack of IBM blade servers can require as few as a couple of dozen cables instead of hundreds.


• Setup and configuration cost: fewer traditional servers and less mounting hardware reduce server management and the time to build and configure a rack of servers.  This translates to savings of management cost.

• Reliability, availability and serviceability: In contrast to traditional rack-mounted servers, a Blade server can be replaced without the use of tools to manipulate mounting hardware and with no need to remove cables. You can just replace a Blade server by pull it out and put back another Blade server in place into the chassis.

• Infrastructure integration: traditional datacenter infrastructures have been characterized by physically separate components for servers, storage and networking gear.  IBM BladeCenter can embed these components into the chassis.

• Cost: the contents and structure of the IBM BladeCenter chassis can result in lower effective cost of additional server nodes, as node density increases.

• Flexible function and technologies: customers can easily benefit from new and alternative technologies without replacing the entire server system. This flexibility keeps the chassis useful and providing protection against obsolescence.