Dell unveiled its new line of blade servers on Monday with boasts and chest-thumping, calling the new model better the competition and offering its own independent study to prove it -- vendor rhetoric par for the course in the market's ongoing server competition.

Blade servers are one the fastest growing areas of tech spending. At the end of the third quarter of last year, server blade revenue had grown worldwide 41.4% year over year, according to IDC, and had passed $1 billion for the first time in a single quarter -- making the technology particularly important to server makers, including Dell. The total server market for that same quarter was over $13 billion.

The new Dell model is the PowerEdge M-Series. The M1000e Modular Blade Enclosure is a 10U-sized enclosure [a U is a unit of measurement of the hieight of a rack-mounted device; it equals 1.75 inches. -- ed.] that can support up to 16 dual-socket blades; the M600 is an Intel-based blade server; the M605, an AMD-based blade server. Both support quad chips from each manufacturer. Dell said it was aiming for flexibility by allowing I/O options that include Ethernet, 4GB Fibre Channel, and Infiniband options. The line also has features for easing remote managment.

The enclosure has a starting price of $5,999. Blades start at $1,849.

Mike Roberts, the senior product planning manager at Dell, said the company has submitted for over 30 patents on this product. In particular, the company put a lot of focus on power management technologies for controlling power supplies and air cooling, and includes features that, for instance, give users the ability to set a ceiling on power so they don't consume over a given amount.

The company contends that it is the most energy-efficient system when compared to other makers, and said it hired an independent party to measure its system against compatible systems from the other vendor systems. That study's results, in turn, claim the Dell system consumes less power and achieves up to 28% better performance per watt than systems offered by Dell's main rivals, HP and IBM.

Can big talk backfire?

Dell isn't unique in aggressively competing in the blade-server space, but the rhetoric had James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Inc., commenting on his blog that the vendors battles weren't necessarily very convincing for users considering blades.

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