But he warns, "All that can add up. So the pluses of using blade servers can get outweighed by the cost of dealing with the high power and cooling needs."

Still, blades are worth the hassle

Although some ITers are quick to point out the costs and other issues inherent with blade servers, they are equally adamant about never going back to stand-alone servers.

Rowell says he wouldn't give up the strong management tools for his Linux and Microsoft environment. "One of the primary reasons we went with blades is for the virtualization tools," he says.

His team has striped multiple instances of software across a host of blades so that when a customer has an event, such as the launch of a new product, they can easily ramp up server capacity to support the traffic surge.