Is it time to rethink your position on blade servers?  A recent vendor neutral article from Processor.com thinks it is.  The October 5th edition of Processor magazine provided an article titled, “Rethink Your Position On Blade Servers” where they offer reasons to look at blade servers in your environment.  The link to the full article is listed below, but in summary, here are the key points:

• Blade servers have changed from the days of past
  • CPU architectures offer greater performances
  • blade servers offer comparable architectures to its rack servers peers
• Blades offer the ability to quickly add additional capacity
• When evaluating blade server vendors look for:
  • a history in developing blade solutions
  • differentiation in the chassis and the total converged platform
• Beyond evaluating the servers, look for other features like:
  • convergence over 10GbE
  • dynamic power management
  • network port virtualization
• Consider the whole blade system (blade, chassis, management, etc) in your TCO.
• Determine how support is delivered as well as proximity of parts and who would service them.

In summary, the article states, “Blade products have shifted from being a clever design to becoming an industry trend.  This testifies to the technology maturity and should assure potential customers that blade investments should hold their value.”

Read the full article at: http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles/P3420/11p20/11p20.asp&guid=

Follow Processor Publication on Twitter at @ProcessorPub

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com. He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace. Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization. Kevin works for Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global 500 market.