PC Blades: Poised To Take Off?PC Blades: Poised To Take Off?

He cites an installation at Norad, the North American Aerospace Defense Command in the Cheyenne Mountains near Colorado Springs, Colo. Individuals at Norad would often have three or four PCs on their desktops, and going to blade terminals has improved security and eliminated the "clutter, heat, and noise nightmare," Knotts says.

HP jumped into the PC blade market because its customers asked it to, says Tad Bodeman, director of thin clients and blade PC solutions for HP. In March, it began offering two PC blades using 1-GHz Transmeta processors. "They told us we were doing a great job of solving some of their concerns like server consolidation," Bodeman says. "But while they might have 5,000 servers, they had 50,000 PCs to manage. Blade PCs give users the full desktop experience and dramatically reduce the support and systems-management costs, and significantly improve security."

Other vendors are more cautious and uncertain that PC blades will ever amount to a large market. IBM has partnered with ClearCube on specific customer projects and began reselling the ClearCube product with an IBM label in the Japanese market.

PC blades cost $1,200 or more and will have a hard time competing on price with a conventional desktop PC that sells for around $500, says Howard Locker, chief architect for IBM desktops and laptops. "We also believe that you can get 90% to 95% of the blade PC [total cost of ownership] benefits on a desktop," he says. "Customers in the past have just not looked to create such controlled user environments."

PC blades move heat and noise problems from the desktop, but they consolidate those problems in the back-office racks in the data center, often requiring expensive installations, he says.

Dell is monitoring the PC-blade market and has begun offering alternatives that it believes are a better answer, says Don McCall, product marketing manager for Dell's corporate desktop business. The company has an undisclosed number of customers who are racking and stacking PCs in a back room and using Avocent stations at the desktop. It also launched a thin-PC program that customers are evaluating, he says. With thin PCs, hard drives and flash memory are removed from the terminals, which are connected to a backroom server platform.

"We don't want to force-feed a hardware solution into a customer's enterprise," McCall says. "We can step into the market if customers demand it, but, at this point, it's not clear there will be a large business for blade PCs."

IDC's Kay believes others will enter the market as volumes grow, leading to more choices, standardization, and potentially a weeding-out of existing vendors. "If you look at the gaming PC market, companies like Alienware, Voodoo PC, and Falcon Northwest were trucking along with volumes of a few thousand a month," Kay says. "When the big boys like Dell, HP, and Gateway entered the market, they cranked it up by an order of magnitude."

Illustration by Peter Bennet