We announced a bunch of blade stuff this morning and I honestly couldn’t think of anything useful to write about it, since it’s a decade or two since I was a sysadmin and discussion of I/O density and the like tends to go over my head. Apparently you can have Xeon and Opteron and SPARC and Windows and Solaris and Linux all in the same chassis, which sounds kind of terrifying to me. I did get to hear Andy Bechtolsheim give the spiel on the I/O design once, I understood maybe 20% but it sounded awesome. Anyhow, there is an interesting angle: it turns out we gave Scoble over at PodTech a pre-release exclusive for his video coverage. Which is not exactly high-gloss marketing, mostly just John Fowler in a monochrome meeting room with some journos, pulling dull silver blades and I/O modules out of dull silver chassis boxes and talking about the tech, taking a few questions. I think it’s immensely more effective than most product-launch bumph. As for the products, I don’t really have an informed opinion; but if you understand blades, you probably will if you watch the video.
