What You Know about Tower, Rack, and Blade Servers

Generally, servers are divided into tower type, rack type, and blade type servers according to their different shapes and structures. What are the differences between these three types of servers, and what are their respective applications?

Tower server

The tower server is the most widely used and common. It looks like a PC with a large volume, and the chassis is generally solid.

Advantages: The cost is lower than that of racks and blade servers. Due to the large chassis, it has good scalability and cooling performance, and can be configured with multiple processors, multiple memories, multiple hard disks, multiple redundant power supplies, and cooling fans.

Disadvantages: The machine weight and space occupancy are the highest compared with the other two.

Suggestion: It is recommended for users who have high requirements for server expansion and cooling performance, and do not purchase many servers and have redundant space.

Rack server

As the name implies, a rack server is a server installed in a rack. It can be uniformly installed in cabinets designed according to international standards. The width of the cabinet is 19 inches, and the height of the cabinet is in U, 1U=1.75 inches=44.45 mm. Different specifications are multiplied on the standard, that is, 2U=89mm, 4U=178 mm.

Advantages: Compared with tower servers, it greatly saves space occupation, makes wiring and management more simple, and saves the hosting cost of the computer room. With the continuous development of technology, rack servers have the same performance as tower servers. Rack servers are a solution that balances performance and space occupation.

Disadvantages: Due to the limitation of the machine body, the expansion capacity and cooling capacity of the tower server is not as good as those of the tower server. This requires a special design of the system structure of the rack server, such as the motherboard, interface, cooling system, etc. The design cost is increased, so the price is generally higher than that of the tower server.

Suggestion: It is recommended for applications with sufficient funds and strong pertinence. Such as service operators requiring intensive deployment, cluster computing, etc.

Blade Server

Blade structure is a more compact and integrated server structure than rack structure, which is specially designed for special industries and high-density computing environments. The blade server is smaller than the rack server in appearance, only 1/3 to 1/2 of the rack server. Each blade is an independent server with an independent CPU, memory, and I/O bus. The operating system can be installed independently through external disks, and different network services can be provided without affecting each other.

Advantages: It is easy to expand. Blades can be hot-swapped. A server cluster is formed through blade racks to provide high-speed network services. If you need to upgrade, just insert new blades into the cluster. Each blade server does not need a separate power supply and other components, but shares server resources, which can effectively reduce power consumption, and can be uniformly wired and centrally managed through the cabinet. This provides great convenience for connection management, and can effectively save the total cost of ownership of the enterprise.

Disadvantages: Up to now, blade servers have not formed a unified standard. Several giants of blade servers, such as IBM, HP, and Sun, are incompatible with each other, resulting in a narrow choice space for blade server users. In addition, the cost of the first two is also the highest.

Recommendation: It is recommended for large enterprises with a large amount of daily processing information, many server clusters, and high-performance requirements.

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