As users scramble to scrimp and save by putting applications on low-cost blade servers, they are increasingly looking for more sophisticated ways to manage, provision and automate these new environments.

Blade servers - high-density, low-power blade computers - have emerged in the past two years as a less-expensive and space-saving option for corporate users looking to build scalable and redundant data centers. Server blades come in the form of single boards one-eighth the size of a typical 1U server and consume up to 12 times less power.

The use of these low-cost devices - prices can start at $1,000 - is skyrocketing. The Yankee Group reports enterprise and telecom users worldwide spent $95 million on blades in 2002, and the market research firm expects to see the market grow to $3.78 billion by 2006. The growing market for blade servers is driving hardware and software vendors to deliver blade management products.

"Now, it's the Wild West in terms of managing blades," says Jamie Gruener, a senior analyst at The Yankee Group. "The server vendors themselves are offering provisioning tools, and the systems management vendors are putting out server management modules."

For now, many users opt to manage servers with homegrown tools. Take Ramaswamy Aditya. He says the blade servers he bought from RLX Technologies are easier to manage than the 1U servers also running in his data center.

"All in all the management of the blade servers is far easier than traditional rack-mount servers, the density is greater and the power consumption much lower," Aditya says.

The CTO at Web application hosting company Zapatec in Berkeley, Calif., uses a combination of remote protocol monitoring for applications, such as syslog and SNMP, to gauge blade performance. Aditya also uses an open source operating system called FreeBSD and Linux on the blade servers to perform out-of-band management.

Along with Aditya, Carl Alexander, senior systems and network administrator at TERC, a nonprofit education research and development organization in Cambridge, Mass., says he manages blade servers via the serial console with a "home-brewed secure console server." And he says the system is flexible and scalable, with no need for software instrumentation.