Blade PC - Design Considerations

Design Considerations

As an alternative to traditional PCs, the blade PC solutions offered by the various vendors are effectively competing with PCs, albeit they are based in datacenters. Therefore some of the more important design considerations in this category include:

• Maximizing the end user experience (this is a “ticket” to entry – end user experience must be comparable to at least low-end traditional PCs)
• Minimizing acquisition cost (as a result traditional PC components are frequently used rather than more expensive server components)
• Maximizing density (because if these devices are to replace millions of traditional PCs by moving into datacenter they must minimize the amount of expensive datacenters space they require)
• Minimizing power consumption (minimizing power input and heat output in a datacenter is critical to keeping data centers properly cooled and datacenter costs down - see HVAC)
• Similar to traditional PCs to deploy and integrate (ease of integration is critical, or the barriers to adoption will prohibit widespread success for the category)
• Easy to manage with the same tools used for other datacenter based HW and SW (otherwise it becomes onerous extra work)