The Skinny on Server Blades

A Full Market

The incentive for vendors to produce server blades and systems has resulted in a market that had few entrants only a year ago but now reads like a veritable who's who in the computer hardware industry. Vendors in the blade market at press time that have announced or intend to announce products include Amphus, Centauri NetSystems, Compaq, Dell, Egenera, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, OmniCluster, Racemi, RealScale Technologies, RLX, and Sun Microsystems. Other companies that have popped up in this sector in recent months include Coventive Technology, LogiCerv Technology, Newisys, Nexcom, and Rauch Medien. We have no doubt there will be more.

All this activity is very good news for enterprises on the buy side. With competition comes innovation, competitive pricing, clever packaging of services, software development, and other advantages.

Most vendors are targeting their server blade offerings at enterprise-level data centers to solve (variously) power consumption, density, provisioning, or management problems. Of course, as the number of vendors increases and the differentiation grows, it will become more important for prospective buyers to carefully fit server blade characteristics to their needs.