Corralling the desktop

By Jennifer Mears, NetworkWorld.com, 10/24/05

ClearCube pretty much created the market for blade PCs when it rolled out its first product in 2000.

The idea was to take the guts of a PC and put it on blades that could be centrally managed in a computer room or data center. End users have only a mouse, keyboard, monitor and a special appliance to link back to the systems. The idea seems like a good one, but was slow to take off. Last year, HP got into the game, too, with a blade PC it introduced as part of its consolidated client infrastructure. IBM, meanwhile, claimed that it wasn’t really seeing interest from customers and opted to simply partner with market leader ClearCube. But now IBM sees opportunity. IBM is partnering with VMware and Citrix to provide hosted PC blades through its Global Services division. The big twist is that IBM is using virtualization technology to put multiple virtual PCs on a single blade. ClearCube and HP still offer a one-PC-to-one-blade architecture.

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