Apex passionately believes in the Blade value proposition.  Together with IBM, Apex has taken a different approach to blades and blade design.  IBM’s Bladecentre helps customers deal with the real problems they are experiencing in today's fast changing business climate.  IBM's innovative approach to blades delivers a new kind of IT building block that helps improve reliability, accessibility, and serviceability.  The result of IBM's innovation is a blade solution that is easier to manage, uses less power, produces significantly less heat, has longer life spans, and is easy to set up and scale.  Apex strongly believes that this innovative approach has lead to the tremendous success we have seen from the IBM Bladecentre.

IBM Bladecentre builds on the IBM commitment to integrating server, storage and networking functionality with technology exchange and heterogeneous management.  IBM Bladecentre offers the ease, density, availability, affordability, and scalability that are central to the blade technology promise, and IBM Bladecentre’s features help lead the way in enabling the self-optimisation, self-healing, and self-protection crucial to the on demand computing revolution.

The IBM Bladecentre’s enterprise architecture incorporates Intel, AMD and PowerPC based servers, networking components from D-Link, Cisco and Nortel and SAN integration from industry leaders Brocade/McData.

Slim, hot-swappable blade servers fit in a single chassis and each is an independent server, with its own processors, memory, storage, network controllers, operating system and applications.  The blade server simply slides into a bay in the chassis and plugs into a mid- or backplane, sharing power, fans, floppy drives, switches, and ports with other blade servers.
The benefits of the blade approach will be obvious to anyone tasked with running down hundreds of cables strung through racks just to add and remove servers. With switches and power units shared, precious space is freed up — and blade servers enable higher density with far greater ease.

Each blade in a chassis is a self-contained server, running its own operating system and software. Sophisticated cooling and power technologies can therefore support a mix of blades, with varying speeds and types of processors. This rapidly developing technology offers real investment protection for the future.

Apex has deployed many blade solutions for customers based around the terminal services or Citrix infrastructure solution or purely for server consolidation and reducing rack footprint.  We have helped customers reduce a disparate sprawl of Intel based servers to an IBM Bladecentre based solution with VMware and demonstrated a real return on investment.