Currently, all suppliers' blades are a different size and shape, although HP has called for all vendors to adopt CompactPCI as a blade standard.
"Maybe some day we will need a blade standard," said Paul Santeler, Compaq's vice president for management, networking and high availability products, who is in Europe on a tour to promote the company's blade servers launched in January. "For now the shelf is the standard." Shelves from different suppliers, which each hold different numbers of their suppliers' blades, can be mixed in the same racks, he pointed out.
Although mixing blades from different vendors might give users the prospect of getting value for money, it would have problems, said Santeler. "If you plug a Dell blade into an HP shelf, who is going to come and fix it for you? It brings up more problems than it answers," he added. --Peter Judge, ZDUK
