Recommendations for blade servers

I am a newbie to the world of blades and as we look ahead to the next build out I want to see if it is worth exploring.
Out environment runs a lot application servers on PE1950 - the faster the chipset better.
We are seeing best utilization from the the quad code cpu
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5430 @ 2.66GHz
cpu MHz : 2660.005

Memory on a typical server is 8G.
From looking at the M1000E it seems to offer a compelling value proposition fitting 16 server in a 10U profile;

1. is the power consumption proportionately lower than deploying 16 x PE 1950?
2. which of hte io subsystems will be shared among the guest nodes on the chassis ? these are web servers so network is a valued resource.

Recommendations/ insights, experiences would be great to hear.

thank,
-prasana