Blade servers are compact computers that work with a blade or rack server, providing services to multiple users over a network. Blades are compressed processing units that work with the rack, which has power, cooling, and protective covers. Cooling is a major concern, but modern blades are better designed and can hold up to 128 servers at once. Blades increase network efficiency and storage issues are resolved with external storage services and alternative connections.
A blade server is a compact server computer, designed to work in conjunction with a blade or rack server. A server computer is a computer designed to provide services and support to multiple users over a network. Each individual blade is a tightly compressed computer processing unit. The blades are designed to work with the rack, as they do not have their own power, cooling or protective covers.
A blade rack looks just like a metal bookcase. The blades can be inserted horizontally or vertically, depending on the selected rack design. All power and network cables are connected to the rack and not to individual blades. This is due to the integrated connectors that plug right into the back of the server blade. Many racks have a glass front door to keep out dust and powerful cooling fans built into the top and bottom.
These fans are used to maintain temperatures at an appropriate level for all blade servers. Blade racks are typically stored in a server room, equipped with built-in cooling capability, a dedicated power source, and air filters. A server blade has three components: memory, processor, and storage capacity. All additional items, such as hard drives, fans, power cords, etc., are removed and built into the rack or in a separate location. This change in design significantly reduces the required space, allowing the same space to support more computer processing capacity.
Cooling is a major concern for blade servers. First generation blade servers would exceed the cooling capacity of a standard server room with blade racks at 50% capacity. The need to create space around each unit for air circulation has reduced the footprint capacity of these units. Modern blades are better designed, and a standard rack can hold up to 128 blade servers at once.
Another benefit of a blade configuration is increased network efficiency. Within the rack, all blades are connected to one or more network buses. This reduces overall costs, as a one-to-one relationship between the server and the network bus is not required.
Storage issues for configuring a blade server are resolved with the use of external storage services and alternative connections. This functionally allows hard drives to be stored in a different location. In an enterprise-scale setup, a storage network, or SAN, is created to manage all of the data and application software. This resource is accessed using dedicated network connections and can actually improve system performance.
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