Consultant Mann says virtualization is also beneficial for companies going through mergers and acquisitions. "If your company all of a sudden buys another company, it's easy to rack up a whole lot of new blades and deploy a virtualized environment to your new employees," he says.

He adds that blades ease management within and between data centers. "Managing dozens of blades is simple. You no longer have to do swivel-chair administration because you can manage them all -- even remote sites -- from a single console," Mann says.

This ease of management allows IT groups to redeploy staff away from tedious server administration tasks, he adds.

Cerner's Smith says the key to balancing the pros and cons of the blade servers is to stay on top of your data center needs and not be caught off guard. One way he does this: "Our IT team meets with the facilities team every week to make sure everything is running smoothly. We have a list we run through -- are we running out of power, space, cooling?" he says.

For InteleNet's Stein, blade servers have been a godsend. "It's worth it for us to make any modifications for our blade servers, because we don't have the headaches we used to have such as unracking servers and tearing them apart to reconfigure them. All we have to do is take out a blade, upgrade it and stick it back in," he says.