The next wave of blades

If the major vendors are right, and blade servers are the future, surely the logical progression will eventually see widespread adoption of blade PCs. It's fair to say e-Volve Corporate technology sees a big future in the concept because it is managing four large blade PC pilots with major banks. The online-only reseller's CEO, David Simpson, said return on investment was massive and predicted others in the channel would have no problem selling the concept to customers that had already gone down the blade server path. The only hurdle he predicted would be the major increase in capital expenditure when compared to paying for a fleet of desktops. However, this is offset to some degree by significant memory usage and processor requirements on a desktop.

Ethan Group recently went through an evaluation process with blade PCs for a customer in the financial industry but the project didn't go ahead. However, the integrator's strategic sales manager, Antony Flutey, noted that it currently sold thousands of PCs every month for little value. If blade solutions helped move the humble PC back up the value chain, he said Ethan would definitely be interested in getting involved sooner rather than later.

Much less enthused by the idea of blade PCs was Oriel Technologies virtualisation practice manager, Rodney Haywood.

"I will be bold enough to say I think blade PC is dead. It's always been a niche and will continue to be so because the market has moved on. There will be people it fits but we don't believe it will fit the general players - the corporate market will not take it up in a big way," he said. "Virtual desktop infrastructure [VDI] is where we see the market going because you get all the benefits of a grid computing model."

MCR general sales manager, Michael Salama, sat on the fence and predicted a future for both technologies. While the high-end of the market could see a return on investment for blade PCs, he predicted the technology would also be a good fit for organisations with just 20 seats because it is cheap, easy to implement and simple to use. In the mid-market, he suggested VDI would come into its own.

"It's horses for courses. There's room for all of the players and all of the technologies. It's about how we as integrators can pitch these stories and make sure customers get what they want," he said.

"I have been in IT for about 28 years and haven't seen any shift as radical as we have seen in the past 12 months. We are moving from a physical world to a truly virtual one. We are moving to a model where PCs are blades and laptops become Citrix clients where you can have a dumb terminal sitting at home connected to a DSL line and access all of the storage you need virtually."