IBM BladeCenter® offers a broad range of storage and networking options integrated into the chassis to simplify infrastructure complexity and manageability while lowering total cost of ownership. IBM BladeCenter technology incorporates engineering resources and design architecture from the IBM Mainframe, System i, and System p product teams. This provides superior design, product quality and fault tolerance above and beyond any blade server on the market today.
Blade servers allow more processing power in less rack space, simplifying cabling and reducing power consumption. According to a SearchWinSystems.com article on server technology, enterprises moving to blade servers can experience as much as an 85% reduction in cabling for blade installations over conventional 1U or tower servers. With so much less cabling, IT administrators can spend less time managing the infrastructure and more time ensuring high availability.
Each blade typically comes with one or two local drives. For additional storage, blade servers can connect to a storage pool facilitated by a network-attached storage, Fiber Channel, or iSCSI storage-area network. The advantage of blade servers comes not only from the consolidation benefits of housing several servers in a single chassis, but also from the consolidation of associated resources into a smaller architecture that can be managed through a single interface.
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