Blades break down barriers

Hi, I'm Tim Golden, director of PowerEdge servers of Dell.My topic today is about blades. What I want to talk about is the impact thatblades will likely have on our traditional IT data resources.

Now I've drawn a little picture of my IT data center here.Inside that IT data center are three different distinct sets of resources.There's the red team, which is represented by our storage guys. There's theblue team, which is our networking guys, and then there is my favorite theserver guys, all right. And these are three different sets of expertise andtypically there's a turf war that each one of these guys respects. They don'tstep outside those turfs. But if we look at what happens when we move to ablade environment, so you can bear with my artwork here. If I look at the frontof the blade server it could be up to ten blades located inside the 7U formfactor. What gets interesting though is if I look at the rear of the bladeserver, if we turn this around and we look at the rear of the thing, the firstthing we notice is there's lots of fans, right? We've got fans on the top,we've got fans on the bottom. But what is interesting is what goes on up here,the upper left and right corners of this. That's because the traditionalfabrics that have been located in the IT data center are going to migrate, ifyou will, and become part of what goes on inside the blades infrastructure. ButEthernet switches, which are the long, bend stand alone resources here becomepart of the fabric of the new blades deployment, and when that happens, anumber of interesting things happen.

First and foremost we're going to see growth. The growththat happens here is anywhere between about 8% and about 15% category growth.But the growth is anticipated by IDC it happened in the blades environment, isa 106% category growth rate over the next three years. That is going to bereally interesting because what it's going to do, is it's going to take thesedevices and it's going to tie them to the growth engine that is blades. Whenthat happens you're sure we're going to see price come down and that willhappen for sure. But what's perhaps more interesting is the effect that thismay have on these traditional IT resources. As they become part of the bladesfabric, their turf wars are going to be challenged a little bit, and it's truewhere in fact, if you look at a blades environment that IT resources couldactually go down. This could require 23% less IT resources or said another way,it could free up 23% of your IT resources to go do something else. So that'sgoing to be real interesting. It's going to force the convergence if you willof the traditional free layers inside the data center into this new thing. It'sgoing to threaten their turf. It's going to cause them to learn new things, andit will be real interesting over the course of the next three years to see whatthe impact of this convergence is on our traditional IT data center.