Hewlett Packard is set to unveil what it is calling a blade PC along with a bunch of other virtualization offerings that have been pushed under the Adaptive Enterprise umbrella.
HP has been trying extra hard to prove that Adaptive Enterprise is a real thing, and its executives have spent a lot of time in recent months trying to convince customers, competitors, Wall Street, and maybe even itself that the Adaptive Enterprise initiative is more than a lot of marketing speak.
The simple fact is that there is no arguing that IT infrastructure is expensive to acquire and maintain and it is often used in a very inefficient manner. Adaptive Enterprise is an approach to trying to fix that, which includes virtualization technologies and business process engineering, among many other things.
IT is hard to describe and manage, so it stands to reason that any set of products and processes that are created to control it would be difficult to describe in a sound bite. Eventually, vendors may stop trying so hard to convince us of their vision and actually get more virtualized, on demand, utility products out the door.
The blade PC is an actual product, or at least it will be when it becomes generally available in March 2004. It is not a new concept, but being the volume leader in desktops and servers will undoubtedly help HP create a blade PC market and dominate it if customers are interested in the concept.
The blade PC is a twist on the now mundane concept of the network computer that links into network-enabled applications that reside on central servers. The first time some of us heard of the blade PC variant on network computing was from ClearCube. ClearCube says that it can cut the cost of putting a desktop environment in front of users by 40% by using shared blades and desktop ports instead of real PCs.
HP is touting similar savings with the blade PC, which is being marketed under the unwieldy name of the consolidated client infrastructure (CCI) solution. HP has revamped its initial QuickBlade ProLiant BL e-Class servers, which could put 20 Pentium III blades (running at 700MHz to 1GHz) in a single chassis and 280 blades in a standard rack, with a new blade that is based on the Transmeta Efficeon processor running at 1.1GHz. These blades, which are called the bx1000s and which have a list price of $799, are equipped with Windows XP Pro, which includes Active Directory and roaming profile features.
This article is based on an original produced by ComputerWire.
