The following table lists the differences between the Blade Servers and Rack Servers:
| Blade Servers | Rack Servers |
| Sits into UCS blade chassis | Sits on a rack |
| Can’t operate independently. Requires UCS infrastructure | Can operate independently |
| Connects only to UCS Fabric Interconnect | Can connect to any Ethernet switch including UCS Fabric Interconnect |
| Managed from the UCS Fabric Interconnect by Cisco UCS Manager | Features Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) and thus can be managed independently or from Cisco UCS Manager if connected to a UCS Fabric Interconnect |
| Supports RAID 0 and 1 only | Supports built-in RAID 0 and 1 for SATA drives. RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 support through a PCIe LSI MegaRAID Controller |
| Supports Gigabit Ethernet Mezz cards and Converged Network Adapter Mezz cards | Supports Gigabit Ethernet PCIe cards, Converged Network Adapter PCIe cards and Fibre Channel HBA PCIe cards. |
| Supports up to two front-accessible, hot-swappable SAS drives for local storage | Supports up to 4 front-accessible, hot-swappable, internal 3.5-inch SAS or SATA drives |
| No support for PCIe slots | Support for up to 2 PCIe 2.0 slots |
| No support for optical drive | Optional front panel optical drive for CD and DVD media |
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