In my experience, most blade based products are hot swappable and the other components will work whether the broken blade is there or not... Again, if the overall configuration is setup right, it could be designed such that another box could take over the functionality of the broken blade.
I am not sure whether combining them is a good thing or not, but it seems to me that it would be similar to running an agent on each of your hosts for host-based IDS. Wouldn't you want the box to have a secondary processor that was ONLY doing IDS, even if it was sending updates to another server of some sorts?
-Ben
On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, Ryan Reynolds wrote:
> Then again there is another issue with mixed boxen, that is often
> overlooked in this multi-tasking era:
> when your vcr/tv/toaster oven has a problem with one of it's functions,
> and is sent for repairs, it means the other functions are by default also
> disabled, so, when you router/firewall/IDS system suffers in one of it's
> functions, it often, most often in fact, means all other functions are
> down until repaired.
