A blade server (blade from English “blade”) is a variant of a computer server in which certain devices are taken outside and assembled in a common basket — blade chassis – in order to optimize the physical space used and save money by consolidating power supplies and cooling in a common chassis.
A bucket is called a blade server chassis, which allows you to provide access to all components of the server machine (for example, network interfaces).
Cisco Blade Servers
Structure
The blade server often brings out the interfaces that ordinary PCs have. And the performance of functions such as cooling, power supply, network connection, connections to solid-state drives, etc. can be assigned to external devices. Together with such devices, a set of servers forms a blade system.
Each blade server contains a processor and RAM inside its enclosure. All other electronic components can theoretically be placed in an external basket. The concept of a blade server implies the possibility of replacing individual components with external elements, which facilitates the server itself.
Plug-in components
The components connected to the blade servers include: power supplies, cooling systems, network connection systems and disk drives. Let’s look at each of these systems in more detail.
Power supplies
Usually, the power supply is installed as a common device for the entire blade system. But it can be either mounted in the server enclosure or installed as a separate physical device.
Cooling systems
The design of Cisco blade servers is designed in such a way as to maintain a balance between the density of distribution inside all electronic devices and the air circulation inside the enclosure. Therefore, such a system does not need additional cooling.
Network connections
The network interfaces implemented in Cisco blade servers are designed for increased data transfer rates over multiple 10/40 GbE channels. The network interfaces are combined into a single device, which reduces the number of external connectors.
Disk drives
They allow you to store large amounts of data and the software used by the server. They are usually placed locally.
Application features
On a standard server rack, the size of a regular server is 1 unit. And the maximum rack can have 42 units, which is equal to 42 servers without using baskets. Blade servers also allow you to place more than 50 servers on one rack.
The maximum efficiency and profitability of using blade servers can be observed when solving tasks such as website hosting and cluster organization. Also, rack-mounted blade servers have hot-swappable support.
And although the technology of building blade servers is not considered closed, in practice it is necessary to use software and components from one company (in our case Cisco), because this is the only way to have a minimum of problems with configuring hardware and management software.