Which is better for blades and rack servers?

&http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/37954.html ">nbsp; We often see servers that can be divided into three types from the appearance type, namely the tower server, the rack server and the blade server. Because of the limited space of the enterprise room and other factors, blade server and rack servers are more and more popular with users, then what is the characteristics of the blade and rack server in the end which is better? This article will discuss this problem with you.

First, rack server and its characteristics

A rack server is a server that can be installed directly into a standard 19-inch cabinet. Typically such servers are somewhat similar to switches in size, so the rack server is actually a product of industry standardization, and its appearance is designed according to a uniform standard and is used uniformly with cabinets to meet the enterprise's server-intensive deployment requirements. The main role of the rack server is to save space, because the ability to put more than one server to a cabinet, not only can occupy a smaller space, but also easy to unified management. The height of a common cabinet is 42U (1u=1.75 inches or 4.4 centimeters), the rack server is 19 inches wide, and most rack servers are 1u-4u high.

The advantage of a rack server is that it takes up less space and facilitates unified management, but because of the internal space constraints, extensibility is limited, for example, 1U of servers are mostly only 1 to 2 PCI expansion slots. In addition, the thermal performance is also a need to pay attention to the problem, in addition to the need for organic cabinets and other equipment, so this server for more servers more large enterprises use, there are many enterprises using this type of server, but the server delivered to the dedicated server hosting agencies to host, In particular, many Web sites are currently using this approach to the server.

Second, blade server and its characteristics

Blade server is a highly available, high-density, Low-cost server platform is specially for the special application industry and high-density computer environment design, its main structure is a large body chassis, inside can insert many "blades", where each blade is actually a system motherboard, similar to a separate server, They can start their own operating system from the local hard disk. Each blade can run its own system, serving a specified set of different user groups, with no association to each other. Also, you can use system software to assemble these boards into a single server cluster. In cluster mode, all blades can be connected to provide a high-speed network environment, share resources, and serve the same user base. By inserting new blades into the cluster, you can improve overall performance. Because each blade is hot-swappable, the system can easily be replaced and the maintenance time minimized.

Depending on the server capabilities required, blades are divided into server blades, network blades, storage blades, management blades, Fibre Channel SAN blades, extended I/O blades, and so on. Blade server has recognized two characteristics, one is to overcome the shortcomings of the chip server cluster, has become the Terminator of the cluster, the other is the implementation of the Cabinet optimization.