blade serverBlade servers are the embedded servers developed on an ultra thin printed circuit boards. These thin circuit boards are known as blades. Each blade is motherboard containing one or more microprocessors, computer network connections, computer storage, and computer memory. All the blades can share common power supply and also the network interfaces. The blades are managed in a chassis called razor, and rack mounted to get compact embedded servers. The blades also share the air-cooling resources of the chassis. The chassis are proprietary and cannot be interchanged with other manufacture's devices. Network types / protocols, CPU types, and RAM selection are three major important concerns associated with blade servers.

Blade Sever Specifications

Blade servers work with several types of central processing units (CPUs). These include AMD (advanced micro devices), Intel, Sun Micro Systems Manufacturers, and Motorola. RAM and cache choices are also available for blade servers. Blade servers support various Ethernet protocols including 10Base-T, 10Base-2, and 10Base-5 most commonly. Besides Ethernet blade servers also use token ring, fiber channel, and fieldbus network protocols

Blade Server Features

In a bigger picture the blade servers differ from other severs in two ways. One is the cost and other is management.

Cost

Space requirements and power consumption affects the computing as well as other expanses in blade servers. Resource sharing reduces the cost with common power supply, cooling fans, and network interfaces. Blade servers being in compact rack mounted form occupy quite less space than other industry standard racks. Resource sharing reduces not only the cost but also the power consumption. One power supply is enough for many blades but drawback is one point of failure. Servers in compact form are much more performance efficient than those of old-fashioned individual computer's server farms or mainframes. Blade servers being in compact and rack mounted form occupy quite less space than other industry standard racks. Therefore they are more favorable for industrial standards. Blade servers require only a few cables to work that simplify the network management.

Blade Server Management Issues

The issues associated with blade server management are the hardware and software. The good thing about blade servers are that the allow streamline management. Blade server management Software provided for the blade servers is proprietary. This means that the hardware (blades) of a particular vendor supports only the proprietary software of that particular vendor. So the users do not have many options in software and bound to one specific management.