Storage Blade Arrays Enable Benefits Of Converged Infrastructures

By Travis Vigil, executive director, Dell

According to a recent Gartner survey, half of enterprises have either implemented or are in the process of implementing converged infrastructures (CI), which includes combined compute, storage, network and systems management resources all packaged in one end-to-end solution. The intent of CI is to consolidate systems, reduce time to deployment, increase resource utilization rates and decrease costs. While CI is gathering momentum in enterprises, a related trend also picking-up speed is the growing acceptance of the blade architecture.

The adoption of blade servers – stripped-down, rack-mountable computers that minimize the use of physical space, cabling and energy – is outpacing the server market.  While server shipments contracted in the second quarter of 2012 (-3.6 percent), blade server shipments were up 4.1 percent, representing 16.9 percent of server sales for the quarter, according to the latest numbers from IDC.