Computer Hardware Terms, Glossary and Dictionary

Server blade, also known as blade server, is a collection of a number of individual minimally-packaged computer motherboard "blades", each including one or more processors, memory, storage, and network connections, but sharing the common power supply and air-cooling resources of the chassis. The idea behind blade servers is that by placing many blades in a single (typically rack-mounted) housing, created systems can be more compact and powerful, but less expensive than traditional systems based on mainframes, or server farms of individual computers. Blade servers are ideal for specific purposes such as web hosting and cluster computing. Individual blades are typically hot-swappable.

Related Terms

server blade