Blades are one of the fastest-growing segments in the IT industry. Already accounting for nearly 10% of all server shipments, blades are expected to grow to represent more than 25% of server shipments by 2011.

For all this success, however, blades have been primarily limited to large-scale deployments into the enterprise market because they can help alleviate the power and cooling and space constraints felt by large datacenters and because they tend to scale cost-effectively with large-scale deployments. In contrast, many mid-market customers house their servers in a spare closet or an office and do not have the same datacenter challenges of large enterprises; furthermore, the up-front investment in the blade server chassis has generally meant that blades are not as cost-effective as rack-mounted servers for typical mid-market deployments of only a few servers.

In this white paper, examine the requirements for servers, storage, and blade systems in the mid-market and how to apply blades your data center in a cost effective manner.