Blade Servers for the Masses: Cost Advantages in Midsize and Enterprise Markets

Early in their adoption cycle, blade servers were designed to provide economies of scale for larger systems. However, only the largest IT organizations gained the capital and operating cost efficiencies to warrant the investment. Today, when third- and fourth-generation products are common, and the choice is between deploying rack-optimized servers and blade servers, cost analyses favor blade servers over a much wider range of deployment sizes and configurations. Both capital expenses and facilities expenses can prove lower for blade deployments with as few as three servers, and the blade advantage is clear in deployments of over eight servers.