This white paper looks at ongoing customer requirements for server platforms and a number of pain points that have developed in recent years, as computer systems have become packed more densely within the datacenter. Power and cooling costs have risen at four times the growth rate of the actual costs of acquiring the servers themselves - and management costs have grown at eight times the acquisition price growth rate. Beyond that, the sheer number of server footprints has multiplied so quickly that the overall solution has become too complex to manage easily or cost effectively. Cabling for rack-optimized servers has also become tangled - figuratively and literally - meaning that any reduction in cabling would also improve operational efficiency.

This IDC white paper describes new server blades from Sun Microsystems and a new shared NIC technology embedded within the Sun Blade Virtualized NEM, which are combined in a bladed server solution for the datacenter to address many of these operational issues. It also describes the competitive nature of the blade server segment, which continues to be one of the fastest-growing segments within the worldwide server market and has attracted the attention of some of the largest IT companies worldwide.