Comment Articles

Lock up your desktops

Matt Loney ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 08 May 2003 15:09 BST

There is a mathematical expression often discussed in certain pub landlord circles that if you add cockneys to a place, then you get a fight. From this it follows that if you subtract cockneys from a fight, you just get a place. Its not quite clear what happens if you remove the place from a fight -- presumably you're left with a bunch of cockneys floating around nowhere in particular flailing their arms --- but you get the idea.

I'm sure there must be a similar equation that works for users and PCs. Take a user, add a PC, and you get a support call. Or a cup full of cappuccino in the CD-tray. Or in some cases -- and I think we'd best leave the logic behind this one to the likes of Bertrand Russell -- you end up with no PC at all.

There is a solution to this, and that is to remove the PC from the user in just the same way that pub landlords remove the cockneys from the fight. I'm not going to consider what happens when you rearrange the equation to get a support call minus a PC, but what is clear is that a user minus a PC can be a very neat result to a lot of problems that plague IT departments everywhere.

The solution is called a blade desktop, or a blade PC. Blades, for those not continually grinding away at the bleeding edge of IT, is the term coined for computers fully contained on a single board (blade) that fits alongside a dozen or more similar computers inside a cabinet that sits in a rack. A connector at the back of the cabinet links all the blade computers together and allows them to share such essentials as power and in some cases storage, and makes it easy to manage them from a single console.

Last year, server vendors got very excited about blade servers because they are something new to vend. Analysts got very excited about blade servers because they are something new to analyse. And right now IT managers around the country are cutting their teeth on blade servers, but we have yet to see evidence that they are getting quite as excited as the vendors and analysts (a familiar story, that).

Blade desktops work on the same premise as blade servers -- that of a rack-mounted cabinet containing a dozen or so computers. But in this case the blades are set up with desktop software, and the cabinet requires some smart switching at the back and some long cables to transmit video signals to monitors on the users' desktops and to transmit mouse and keyboard signals back to the cabinet.

This year it looks as though blade desktops might be gaining more cachet, thanks mainly to HP -- the biggest PC maker in the world -- joining such stalwarts as ClearCube in producing the things.