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Keynoter: Systems may pack in $2.3B in business by '05
San Jose, Calif. - Opportunities for server blades are coming on strong, but so are the difficulties of managing, cooling and picking the right interconnects for this emerging category of densely packed systems, said computer executives at the Server Blade Summit here last week.
While traditional PC towers still represent half the server business, blades-essentially, shelves of server cards stacked in a 19-inch rack-are on track to grow as fast as rack-mounted systems did in the late 1990s. Blades could become a $2.3 billion business of 800,000 units a year by 2005, said James Mouton, vice president of the platform division of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s X86 server group, speaking in a keynote address here.
Mouton and a counterpart from Sun Microsystems Inc. agreed that blades are set to take on all three tiers of data center jobs, handling Web traffic, applications and database transactions. Some users are experimenting with blades as an engine to drive thin-client computers, replacing traditional business desktops, said Mouton.
At the...