Online retailer Lastminute.com has moved its most important applications onto a blade server architecture.

The technology will help the web-based company to grow its infrastructure more cost effectively in the future, as well as making a more resilient server environment, says head of technical architecture Paul Chudleigh.

'Our growth is exponential, with our server load increasing by 70 to 100 per cent per year. As we kept moving up, we realised we needed more hardware in our server infrastructure,' he said.

The company faced a choice between buying more high-end servers or moving to a different architecture, but eventually decided to go for a farm of smaller servers.

'We've migrated most of our applications onto four IBM blade centres containing a total of 56 blades running dual 2.8Ghz Xeon processors,' said Chudleigh.

'Our server infrastructure runs the customer-facing part of our infrastructure, maintains a supplier intranet and connects to various third party systems for flight, hotel and holiday bookings. The blade centres have helped us to scale up nicely.'

'The blades have given us lots of resilience by being able to lose a few blades without any problem, which wasn't the case with the big individual servers before,' he said.

In February, Chudleigh started reviewing and testing products from a range of vendors, including Apple and HP, before deciding on IBM's blade centre product in June and starting implementation.

The decision was made due to IBM's higher density and high memory support, but management was also crucial.

'As we shifted from four big servers to 56 smaller servers, we needed to make sure that we didn't need to increase our staff costs to manage the servers. IBM's management console allows us to have one person managing the whole server environment.'