Remember that a "box" is a unit for commodity.
Your mid sized mainframe will be at least a full rack, plus ancillaries. This can be analogous to a rack full of blades.
Your mid sized mainframe will be at least a full rack, plus ancillaries. This can be analogous to a rack full of blades.
I'd argue that blades are already bordering on being outside of "commodity", at least in this context reliability, since a single chassis replaces some number of actually-commodity standalone boxes with both shared PoFs and highly-customized designs (especially high density that results in thermal unreliability if not outright failure).
[1] Although some blade systems did offer things like integrated shared switches, they failed to make them cheap enough, so, in practice, it didn't happen. Personally, I suspect there was never enough advantage to putting ethernet or even InfiniBand on a backplane instead of cables, not at blade chassis scale of a dozen nodes.