Storage
While computers typically use hard disks to store operating systems, applications and data, these are not necessarily required locally. Many storage connection methods (e.g. FireWire, SATA, E-SATA, SCSI, SAS DAS, FC and iSCSI) are readily moved outside the server, though not all are used in enterprise-level installations. Implementing these connection interfaces within the computer presents similar challenges to the networking interfaces (indeed iSCSI runs over the network interface), and similarly these can be removed from the blade and presented individually or aggregated either on the chassis or through other blades.
The ability to boot the blade from a storage area network (SAN) allows for an entirely disk-free blade, an example of which implementation is the Intel Modular Server System. This allows more board space to be devoted to extra memory or additional CPUs.
Depending on vendors, some blade servers may include or exclude internal storage devices.
Read more about this topic: Blade Server
Famous quotes containing the word storage:
“Many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)