companies selling blade servers include Supermicro, Hitachi. Blade models The prominent brands in the blade server market are Supermicro, Cisco Systems, HPE, Dell and IBM, though the latter sold its x86 server business to Lenovo in 2014 after selling its consumer PC line to Lenovo in 2005. In 2009, Cisco announced blades in its Unified Computing System product line, consisting of 6U high chassis, up to 8 blade servers in each chassis. It had a heavily modified Nexus 5K switch, rebranded as a fabric interconnect, and management software for the whole system. HP's initial line consisted of two chassis models, the c3000 which holds up to 8 half-height ProLiant line blades (also available in tower form), and the c7000 (10U) which holds up to 16 half-height ProLiant blades. Dell's product, the M1000e is a 10U modular enclosure and holds up to 16 half-height PowerEdge blade servers or 32 quarter-height blades. See also Blade PC HP BladeSystem Mobile PCI Express Module (MXM) Modular crate electronics Multibus Server computer References External links BladeCenter blade servers – x86 processor-based servers .............................................................................................................................................................................................. Server hardware Computer-related introductions in 2001