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The BL series of servers are a relatively new way to maximise your server room real estate. Housed in a blade enclosure, they are stripped down servers that tend to be used for single purposes in a corporate environment. An enclosure may contain one server to act as a web server, another to run a back end database, another to host a particular application being run through the website and another to handle financial transactions. Working together they cost less to set up and run. They also individually generate less heat - an important consideration in the smooth running and maintenance of data centres.

The blade enclosure handles all the power, cooling, management, connections and networking requirements of the grouped servers. In addition, with proper planning for fail-over and redundancy built into your infrastructure, replacement of server components that fail can be achieved through hot-swapping blades, reducing down time for the business and maximising the flexibility of you or your staff in responding to issues within the datacentre.

Buy HP ProLiant Server devices without internal hard disks to save even more money. The main use of the range is for enterprise-level rollouts with external storage. The BL200 series is intended for use with High Performance Computing cluster and scale-out solutions for applications and operating systems. For data centres running databases or providing the underlying network infrastructure either in physical or virtualised environments, the BL400 series is a better choice. For the highest concentrations of virtualised machines in an enterprise data centre, look to the BL600 series for blade servers with the sheer processing power to handle the heaviest workloads or consolidation projects.

The reduced footprint of the Blade Servers means that the chassis that contain them allows data centre managers to fit many more servers into their cabinets than they might otherwise consider. The smallest size that an individual server might otherwise take would be a 1U unit, roughly the height of a pizza delivery box, with forty two of them fitting into a discrete cabinet. Under normal circumstances, each server would have its own power supply and network connections required to tie it into the wider infrastructure. Instead, with an enclosure full of blades, the power supply requirements are hugely reduced - requiring only one supply for the enclosure and a fibre connection for connection to the rest of the network. Of course it goes without saying that a standard kettle lead isn't going to cut it - you need to be talking a proper three phase electricity supply, but then if you haven't already factored that into the design and running of your data centre you've got bigger problems on your hands than cable management.

Don't underestimate the power requirements of your air conditioning either. These units may seem underpowered individually, but together they throw out a lot of heat. It is still far less than the equivalent number of full servers, and they take far less room. As a key element in maximising your IT investment, Blade Servers are an important tool in your kitbag.

If you're looking to buy HP ProLiant Server items, we have everything you need. Try the HP ProLiant G6 BL Blade Server for a reliable and inexpensive platform for managing all your server consolidation and virtualization requirements. Blade servers are stripped down devices optimised for inclusion in high end datacentres rather than stand-alone resources.