As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses continually seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users of information is an information handling system. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes, thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary with regard to the kind of information that is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use, including such uses as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
In conventional compute blade chassis designs, each compute blade has its own couple of local hard disk drives that are used for bootstrapping the operating system and/or local storage. These two local hard disk drives are typically mirrored using a host-based and/or an operating system-based RAID solution to provide fault tolerance. However, such a design impacts compute blade density, form factor, air flow, and thermal cooling, and, in addition, adds cost to the overall compute blade design. It is typical to include a minimum of two hard disk drives on each compute blade of the system. For example, assuming a compute blade configuration has ten compute blades, at least twenty local hard disk drives would be needed, a minimum of two per compute blade, to support the compute blade configuration.