Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index In computing marketing-speak, the term blade designates a standardised module which one can plug in to a computer system - after the mannner of a changeable blade in a kitchen appliance. Physical server blades supplement processing power; virtual software blades add specialised processing. Blade servers consist of computer processing modules with a height of 1 inch, a width of 19 inches and variable depth. Some users also refer to them as 1RU (1 rack unit) servers, as they occupy a single slot in an electrical equipment rack. Hardware vendors such as Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard and software vendors like Informix (with its DataBlades) have attempted to popularise the blade approach. Compare the concept of a RAID device as a sort of storage blade. For other uses of the word blade see blade (disambiguation) This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.