[themcgruff]

(I'm the author of the post).

These aren't blades and I dislike blades for the hardware/vendor lockin reasons you mentioned. Blades usually share power, network, etc. These only share power + baseboard management controller. We can lose a single power supply and still keep on going. We've distributed the applications over multiple chasis, just in case though.

[rdl]

Ah, I haven't messed with these things yet. Do you like them?

[themcgruff]

The BMC is horrible. It needs a cold reset frequently, and it often doesn't work at all when access from a non Windows machine. Otherwise they work really well. I like that the sleds are able to be removed from the front too.