In my organisation we are thinking about buying blade servers - instead of rack servers. Of course technology vendors also make them sound very nice. A concern, that I read very often in different forums, is, that there is a theoretical possibility of the server chassis going down - which would in consequence take all the blades down. That is due to shared infrastructure.

My reaction on this probability would be to have redundancy and by two chassis instead of one (very costly of course).

Some people (including e.g. HP Vendors) try to convince us, that the chassis is very very unlikely to fail, due to many redundancies (redundant power supply, etc.).

Another concern on my side is, that if something goes down, spare parts might be required - which is difficult in our location (Ethiopia).

So I would ask to experienced administrators, that have managed blade server: What is your experience? Do they go down as a whole - and what is the sensible shared infrastructure, that might fail?

That question could be extended to shared storage. Again I would say, that we need two storage units instead of only one - and again the vendors say, that this things are so rock solid, that no failure is expected.

Well - I can hardly believe, that such a critical infrastructure can be very reliable without redundancy - but maybe you can tell me, whether you have successfull blade-based projects, that work without redundancy in its core parts (chassis, storage...)

At the moment, we look at HP - as IBM looks much to expensive...

thanks a lot best regards Christian