Three years ago I stopped by the Server Blade Summit in San Jose. It was a pretty small event and mostly vendor-attended at that time. Blades were still trying to shake their negative image of being power hungry, hard to cool and expensive. How times have changed.

These days, I talk to more and more IT professionals who are relying on blade servers to reduce space demands in the data center. And in most cases they’re coupling the blade systems with virtualization to get even more bang for the buck. It’s true that blades, because they’re compact and modular, are the perfect platform to support virtual environments. Blades really are shaking off the negative image.

Think of Egenera, which right out of the gate began offering a blade package that uses virtualization to provide buyers with a pool of computing resources. IBM is talking about blades and virtualization at a new BladeCenter-focused event it’s holding this week.

At next month’s Server Blade Summit, which is subtitled “Blades & Virtualization: The Perfect Marriage,” there is going to be a great line-up of vendors to see. The event runs May 1-3 in Anaheim, Calif. Check out details here and register here. If you're interested in blades – and/or virtualization – it looks like this show would be worth the trip.

I recently spoke with Barb Goldworm, a longtime industry analyst who is chairing the conference. Goldworm just published a book called, “Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs”. I’ll get into more detail about her book in Part 2 of this newsletter.

Organized by Goldworm, the annual summit is in its sixth year. “For the first five years, the event was focused on blades as a new hardware platform. There was a tremendous amount of vendor interest. It was a successful conference from a vendor perspective,” Goldworm says. “Now we want to deliver content to the user community. The user community is saying, ‘I need to understand the technology and the ROI. Is this technology I should be using in my data center? What do I need to know about [blade servers and virtualization] independently and together?’”

As a result, the summit includes a number of new tracks, including some looking at virtualization independent of blades. There also will be an ROI TCO lab on the show floor, which will have tools for users to figure out their own estimated ROI and TCO for both server blades and virtualization.