Blade servers have become a strategic component of data center environments from the smallest to the largest enterprises. While some vendors and blade advocates recommend blades everywhere, the available systems don't yet cut it in all environments.
Specific technical limitations of blade servers, though vendors are addressing them, need to be understood before making a migration to this platform. Some of the items to be investigated include:
- Available RAM.
- Number of I/O ports.
- Processor speeds.
- Number of CPUs.
- Specialized adapters.
As new generations of blade servers become available, most limitations will disappear. For the moment, some environments will be more cost effectively supported by other server form-factors.