A blade is a server or storage system that's been reduced in size and made modular while retaining many features of its traditional form. For example, a server blade has a central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), hard disks and network interfaces.
Blades slide into an enclosure, which includes cooling and power (signal midplane and power backplane) and network infrastructure (interconnect) components that are shared among blades. Interconnects hold local area network (LAN) and storage area network (SAN) interconnect modules, such as network and Fibre Channel (FC) switches. Blades communicate with these modules over the shared midplane rather than through network or fiber cables.
HP's blade solutions are called BladeSystems. An HP BladeSystem supports many server blades at once and enables you to host a wide variety of applications on Microsoft Windows, Linux, HP-UX, OpenVMS and other operating system platforms. You can support server blades, storage blades, tape blades and a combination of virtual machines. In addition, you can connect to a variety of the most popular networking technologies and standards including Ethernet, FC and InfiniBand.
Benefits of a blade solution
Although blades were once the IT infrastructure solution exclusively for the enterprise, cutting-edge blade technologies by HP have made a blade solution right for SMBs. BladeSystems are:
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Cost savvy: The consolidated design is more affordable to buy and efficient to own than conventional IT integrated redundancy from the start. Fewer wires and other components save up to 40 percent over traditional rack-mounted infrastructures.
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Change ready: HP Virtual Connect architecture and a modular design lower barriers to change and speed growth. Add, replace and recover resources on the fly without rewiring.
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Energy thrifty: HP Thermal Logic technology improves efficiency by managing power and cooling as a resource. Use up to 30 percent less power and push less hot air into your server room.
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Time smart: HP Insight Control Environment for BladeSystem software manages an automated and centralized infrastructure to save valuable time, increased administrator productivity, simple inventory, provisioning and recovery, plus rapid patching and repairing.
Blade devices range from servers and storage devices to workstations and virtual desktops. Many of the most popular products you may be familiar with are now available in a blade design. Although server blades are traditionally linked with rack-mounted systems, blade solutions are a vast improvement over this traditional design.
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