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Technology Stocks : The New QLogic (ANCR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: trendmastr who wrote (28983)	4/28/2002 1:29:01 PM
From: trendmastr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

From Barron's April 29th, 2002 Blades Will Be Sharp When Buyers Start Buying Again By BILL ALPERT If anyone were buying servers, they'd want blade servers. Along with a Hollywood-sexy name, blade servers offer to slice the expense of running data centers, where big enterprises do their critical computing on racks of powerful computers known as servers. Blade servers reduce power bills, eliminate thickets of cable and save personnel costs. The blade architecture disaggregates the pieces found inside a traditional server, says Colin Fowles, director of the blades business team at Sun Microsystems. Each blade card has a processor chip, DRAM memory chips and a hard disk drive, but other components, such as power supplies and cooling fans, are shared among server blades. The blades plug into a network backbone that runs up the rack. Network routers, switches and storage devices will also assume upright positions as blades, instead of the horizontal rack form they now assume. The whole computer industry seems to be honing blade products. Firms such as Intel and BroadCom have chips. Pioneering blade server systems have been fielded by startups such as Cubix, Edgenera, LinuxNetworx and RLX Technologies. But the big computer firms are drawing their blades this year, including Compaq Computer, Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun. Compaq leads the biggies, having introduced its ProLiant BL server in January. Mary T. McDowell, the senior vice president who runs Compaq's Industry Standard Server Group (and who's tapped to run that server group in the post-merger H-P), says Compaq has shipped more than 3,000 processor blades to date. Like Gillette, Compaq will sell you a ten-pack of blades -- for $17,091. In a rack space that held 42 traditional servers, the ProLiant BL crams 280 server blades. The system can run a mix of system software, with some blades running Microsoft Windows 2000 and others running Linux software from vendors such as Red Hat Software and SuSe. Each Compaq blade has an Intel Pentium III chip that runs at low voltage to keep the densely-packed rack from overheating. By quarter's end, says McDowell, Compaq will be shipping blades with two processors per unit, going to four processors by year end. Intel is eager to supply server chips. At its analyst meeting Thursday, the company argued that its Itanium chips performed 30% to 48% better than Sun's SPARC processors, at as little as 20% of the cost. Unhappy Returns: The Nasdaq Composite lost 2.9% on Friday and 7.4% on the week, to close at 1663.89. Intel failed to impress analysts at an annual gathering. Amazon.com's good quarter stood out among the week's many disappointing reports. Sun will ship its blade products in the second half of this year, says blade boss Fowles. Like Compaq's, the Sun product will allow a software mix -- but in Sun's case, the mix will be Sun's Unix software running on its SPARC processors, or Linux running on Intel-compatible processors. Unlike Compaq, however, Sun plans to open its design to third-party firms that want to offer add-on blades specialized for network security or multimedia. These early blade servers are best suited for simple computing jobs, like hosting Web pages. When manufacturers deliver multiprocessor blades, and faster internal networks, blade servers will take on heavier tasks such as running e-mail servers and Oracle databases. While Compaq is clearly moving product, Sun blade man Fowles thinks that many customers will take 2002 to study the new offerings of H-P, IBM and Sun. Next year, he hopes blades will start flashing and eventually gain as much as a third of the server market.