Surly we should be asking exactly is driving the demand for high density computing and in which market sectors and is this actually the best technical solution to solve them problem. I don't care if IBM, HP etc etc want to keep selling new shiny boxes each year because they are telling us we need them - do we really? ...?
Perhaps not. But until projects like <http://www.lesswatts.org/> show some major success stories, people will keep demanding big blade servers. Given that power and HVAC are such key issues in building big datacenters, and that fiber to the office is now a reality virtually everywhere, one wonders why someone doesn't start building out distributed data centers. Essentially, you put mini data centers in every office building, possibly by outsourcing the enterprise data centers. Then, you have a more tractable power and HVAC problem. You still need to scale things but it since each data center is roughly comparable in size it is a lot easier than trying to build out one big data center. If you move all the entreprise services onto virtual servers then you can free up space for colo/hosting services. You can even still sell to bulk customers because few will complain that they have to deliver equipment to three dara centers, one two blocks west, and another three blocks north. X racks spread over 3 locations will work for everyone except people who need the physical proximity for clustering type applications. --Michael Dillon