In confirmation of what you probably already knew about blade servers, the market analysts over at Gartner have declared that while bade severs will continue to see breakneck growth in terms of shipments, it will take at least three more years before it will see a deployment figure of 20 percent.

One of the current limitations of blade server technology is the constraints imposed on input/output connectors of 10Gbits, which looks much less impressive once you plug multiple servers and then try to fire up another more virtual machines for each physical blade. Gartner expects breakthroughs that will scale input/output interconnects beyond 10Gbits, as well as the ability to individually tweak bandwidth by blade level, and even the virtual machines that might be running on the individual blades.

What I think interesting is that advancements in blade server technologies are predicted to reach the point where it will be possible to join two blades into a single logical server within the next two years. Other breakthroughs will probably come in the form of breakthroughs in chassis interconnects that might even make memory aggregation across blades possible.

Server hardware aside, if you are into networking, you might be interested to know that a New York hardware reseller has just been sentenced to 30 months for knowingly selling fake Cisco products. There doesn't appear to be too much information available, but I would venture to guess that the hardware bits that he dabbled in are reverse-engineered appliances manufactured at a much lower cost. They are then loaded with Cisco firmware and dressed to look like the real thing.

Anyone here came across "fake" computer hardware before? How can it be identified? - Paul