Enterprise infrastructure in no longer the sole domain of large corporates. Small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) have growing demands of their own when it comes to networking, compliance, storage and servers, and they`re demanding enterprise-class technology. HP and IBM are hoping to capitalise on this trend with new offerings that make blade server technology more accessible to the mid-market.

Conventional wisdom said that if you had less than seven servers, you didn`t need blade infrastructure. Blades, it seemed, were not a feasible option for SMBs, much to the dismay of vendors like HP and IBM, both of which carry a strong focus on that market sector. In an ongoing effort to find new ways of packaging enterprise-class technology for smaller players in the market, however, both companies have come up with blade infrastructure offerings that attempt to make blades more affordable.