"The impact on facilities wasn't considered when blades first came out, so you have to do some serious capacity planning and architecture development before deploying them," says Brian Smith, data center manager at The Cerner Corp. in Kansas City, Mo.

Blades are self-contained servers that support high-density computing. Unlike their stand-alone predecessors, they share components, such as a monitor, with other blades to ease management, allow for organized cabling and smaller server footprints in the data center.

Cerner, which hosts applications for hospitals, has been working with blade servers in its seven data centers for the past three years and has almost 1,200 in use today.

Smith says he has learned firsthand the promise and perils of the technology. On the upside, blade servers allow companies to consolidate their operations and employ advanced management tools such as virtualization. On the other hand, blade servers are notorious energy drains that wreak havoc on data centers' power and cooling resources. "Data centers can cook if they aren't prepared for the high density," Smith says.

Blades have bigger power needs