Of course, a 'Blade Everything' philosophy is not in the best interest of your customers, Mr Dell, for it is HP leading with you struggling to follow. And your thoughts that applying that philosophy could actually increase IT complexity, are perfectly understandable from a vanquished point of view.

Talk about being a bad loser, strewth.

If you want the necessary Breadth in Depth Processing Power for Virtualisation then Blade is the Future of Massive/Colossal Computing.

Get used to IT.

It's not like HP and IBM have jettisoned THEIR rackmount and pedestal servers. Dell is just touting it's strongest card until it can push a C-class lookalike out the door.

If they are pushing this line, it is probably to prepare the shareholders for a resounding failure when they find out it takes more than a rectangular cabinet to make a Blade System (or Center, if you prefer.)

Dell is just not an Enterprise-class designer, and that's what it takes to do blades right. HP and IBM (and even SUN!!!) have the engineering wherewithal to create a proprietary standard that customers can trust.

Dell is still trying to push the supply-chain story against an increasingly complex IT environment.

'"We think (HP's) strategy is impractical for customers looking to reduce IT cost and complexity and aiming to take maintenance and operations to 30 per cent of the IT budget and innovation to 70 per cent," Dell said.'

So you want 70 percent of my IT budget to be spent on innovation? Nuts to that! I intend to make sure that 70 percent of the IT budget is spent on IT people.

So blades are a poor investment? Yet Dell intends, I assume, to roll out some new blades of their own in the future. At which time blades will become a good investment.

For the right purposes, a box of blades is the right thing to do. If you want raw horsepower from one machine, nothing beats a 6U dual processor Itanium (except maybe a quad dual core Opteron, both of which Dell will be more than happy to sell you). But for price per computer, blades can't be beat. I can't build an 8 node cluster out of 1U boxes for anywhere near the price of an 8 blade box. A box that's easier to maintain. And mind you, this knowledge comes from running Dell blades.

With the rise of virtualization, who cares about blades still anyway? unless you're Google with thousands of the things, surely blades are't much nicer to deal with than normal rack units anyway?

>If you want raw horsepower from one machine, nothing beats a 6U dual processor Itanium (except maybe a quad dual core Opteron, both of which Dell will be more than happy to sell you).

How about 1 4U 2x dual core IBM Power6 box. Cheaper than an Itanium and way more reliable.