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Marathon Technologies Corporation 1
CHAPTER 1 Introduction
Fault-Tolerant Computing for Mission Critical
Windows Applications
The Trend Toward Blades
Blade configurations like the IBM BladeCenter have become popular
because they provide several key advantages over conventional pedestal
or rack-mounted servers. These advantages include:
• Flexibility and Ease of Installation
Because blades get their electrical power and network interconnections
from the chassis, adding processing power to an existing chassis is as
simple as inserting the blade and configuring its software and network
address. No additional cabling or electrical power connections are
required.
• Ease of Management
System management tools like the IBM Director permit hundreds of
blade servers to be maintained remotely through use of a single graphi-
cal console. This tool provides a common management view across
multiple servers in a chassis and enables a smaller IT staff to manage
the same number of servers.
This chapter discusses the key advantages of IBM BladeCenter and Mara-
thon Technologies FTvirtual Server and how they combine to create a truly
fault-tolerant environment for mission critical Windows applications.