Appendix K: Blade Servers
K.0 TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW1
A blade server plugs into the back or midplane of a chassis, like books slide into a bookshelf, sharing power, fans, floppy drives, and switches with other blade servers. The blades are literally servers on a card, containing processors, memory, integrated network controllers, an optional Fibre Channel HBA, and other I/O ports. Each blade typically comes with one or two local ATA or SCSI drives. For additional storage, blade servers connect to a storage pool facilitated by a NAS, Fibre Channel, or iSCSI SAN.
A high level of scale can be achieved with blade servers by simply adding books to the shelf. Blade management is a key feature offered by vendors. HP (OpenView) and others are extending ...
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