Blade servers have evolved rapidly in the past eighteen months. New product introductions by all of the major vendors, including Dell, HP, IBM and Sun, have leveled the playing field and resolved many of the problems that were seen with the first generation products. For the majority of enterprises the question is no longer whether to migrate to a blade technology for the data center, but rather when to migrate.

However, even with this new generation of blade servers there are some issues that continue to be of concern to the IT staff selecting these products. Several are related to the physically compressed structure of the blade servers while others relate to the processor operations and networking.