Four years after their inception, blade servers may finally be emerging as a viable enterprise-class platform for corporate data centers.

According to market intelligence firm IDC of Framingham, Mass., the rate at which blades were adopted in 2005 was more than two and a half times that of traditional rack-mounted servers.

Analysts say they expect more organizations to deploy blades in 2006, especially as vendors begin to unveil powerful 10 Gbps backplanes that could enable hosting of more robust applications and services.

Thus far, IBM and Egenera Inc. are the only two blade vendors to offer 10 GB backplanes, although Dell Inc., Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and other vendors are expected to follow suit.