One of the latest new trends in designing your server roomis using blade servers. Now a lot of people are used to using these big towerboxes that had their own disk drives in them and they had their own networkconnections going in at the back and it was a big tower box and it sat on yourfloor and it was hard to keep track of. Well, now they're replacing them withthese giant enclosures and inside the enclosures, you put these things calledblades. Now each blade is just like a razor blade, going into the razor bladesholder is having several different pieces of technology on it. It may have fourprocessors and may also have a couple of disk drives on it, scuzzy disk drives,as a matter of fact.
Blades are so flexible and so versatile that the idea isthat you can fit maybe as many as 100 or more into one enclosure, taking up thesame space that like three towers took before. They call that density, when youcan pack many more blades, well many more servers on to the same amount of floorspaces as used to only be able to pack like five servers. That means yourdensity goes up. But the big question is: is it worth the cost, because as itturns out, the blades from most manufacturers come at a premium. It costs youway more money than these tower PCs. You have to really look at the fine printand do your math and plug it over to a spreadsheet to figure out whether thegain in density is actually worth the added expense.
Now, Dell Computer has been trying to change that. They'retrying to say, hey look, you can have the added density and we'll even give youmore density than everybody else, including Hewlett Packard and IBM and Egeneraand these other guys will make blade servers, and we do it for less moneyinstead of more money, the premium that could be as like IBM are charging anEgenera and HP. Dell are saying, look over here folks, this thing here, lessmoney than this thing over here. If it's a lot more blades in the same spacethat it would take to put like only three or four tower service, but it costsless money instead of more money, all the other guys are charging more money.
Dell is using its supply-chain technology to bring theprices down on service and you know what happens, when Dell puts pressure onIBM and HP and they force them to lower the prices. They shift their entireoperation off to China.
