Is a blade server a cluster system or a multiprocessor system? [closed]

Solution 1:

A blade server is simply a chassis with individual blades that share some common elements, such as the chassis, power supply, cooling, and related cabling.

Each blade is its own server, with it's own CPU and RAM, and possibly storage. Storage may of course be provided by a SAN solution over e.g. iSCSI.

The blades operate as individual servers. Each blade may or may not have multiple CPU sockets, but today all modern CPU's are multicore, so they will effectively be multi-CPU-systems. Blades in one or more chassis may be configured as a cluster, if it's convenient for the workload.

Computer racks are commonly 19", and the minimum equipment size is 1U. For a lot of simple servers, this is simply overkill. By placing them into a chassis that is mounted in a 19" rack, density can be increased quite a lot.