Cascading failover of blade servers in a data center implemented by transferring by a system management server a data processing workload from a failing blade server to an initial replacement blade server, with the data processing workload characterized by data processing resource requirements and the initial replacement blade server having data processing resources that do not match the data processing resource requirements; and transferring by the system management server the data processing workload from the initial replacement blade server to a subsequent replacement blade server, where the subsequent replacement blade server has data processing resources that better match the data processing resource requirements than do the data processing resources of the initial replacement blade server.