A recent thread here on delltechcenter asked for a power consumption comparison between the PowerEdge 1950 1U rack mount server vs the PowerEdge M600 blade. It turns out that there are a few whitepapers that have been done on 2950 power consumption and a big study on the blades power consumption - but nothing I can find that directly compares the two. The best way to get a comparison between just about any current or recent Dell server is to use the Dell Datacenter Capacity planner. It allows you to build out a rack of servers and get an estimate of power consumption.

If you use similar configurations for 16 PowerEdge 1950s and a full M1000e chassis (16 blades) then the blades configuration will consume less power. So you can save a significant amount of power by going with blades over similar traditional rack mount servers.

If you combine the efficiencies of the blades with the efficiencies of running lots of VMs on a single physical server - you might have the ultimate in power efficiency. This is one reason to use blades for virtualization - we'll be chatting about this and other reasons next week in our TechTuesday chat.

Todd