Company ABC has a 13-year-old blade server that needs to be replaced. Their options are to get another blade system, or consider installing clustered servers. In both cases, there is redundancy if applications are virtualized. The blade server has dual controllers in case one fails but there may be performance degradation. The second option is there are as many controllers as there are servers in the cluster, so if one goes down, applications continue executing with minimal degradation. The Second option maps to a SAN with dual controllers using RAID 10.

If both controllers of the blade server or the SAN fail, in either case data is not available. I would consider a third option, and place data in a Cloud Storage as a hot backup for the clustered environment. This option would not work for the blade ser

If both controllers of the blade server fails, then applications are not available. This would be a problem for critical systems, but may not be for non-critical systems. I would go with the clustered environment.

Explanation

Blade servers are very dependable, but there is the chance that one will fail. The market has shown that vendors may be affected by their own disasters and may not be able to replace the controller in decent time. It will be up to the customer to decide if performance degradation is allowable. On the other hand, if both controllers fail, then the customer could be plain out of luck. The Data Center will have to purchase new equipment, to re-installations and restorations from their backups.