Computing blade

In computing marketing-speak, the term blade designates a standardised module which one can plug in to a computer system - after the mannner of a changeable blade in a kitchen appliance.

Physical server blades supplement processing power; virtual software blades add specialised processing.

Blade servers consist of computer processing modules with a height of 1 inch, a width of 19 inches and variable depth. Some users also refer to them as 1RU (1 rack unit) servers, as they occupy a single slot in an electrical equipment rack.

Hardware vendors such as Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard and software vendors like Informix (with its DataBlades) have attempted to popularise the blade approach.

Compare the concept of a RAID device as a sort of storage blade.

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For other uses of the word blade see blade (disambiguation)