Corporation recognizes blade PCs as a category separate from other types of PCs and has begun issuing forecasts for blade PCs. History and vendors ClearCube, a small privately held company based in Austin, Texas, gets credit for creating and popularizing the category. Started in the late 1990s, they have been very aggressive promoting the concept especially in the United States and in vertical markets such as financial traders, hospitals and national defense organizations. HP was second to the category with the 2004 announcement of their “Consolidated Client Infrastructure” in North America. In contrast to ClearCube, HP emphasized density while minimizing power consumption, which resulted in the ability to put far more blade PCs in an industry standard 42U rack (up to 280). HP’s first offering, however, was a Transmeta-based solution, which offered only a marginal end user experience. HP has since migrated to AMD-based blade PCs. Like the other blade PC vendors, HP offers MS RDP with their solutions, and they have announced availability of another protocol called Remote Graphics Software that has some advantages over MS RDP, especially in regard to delivery of three-dimensional and streaming content. Hitachi offers a blade PC of their own in Japan. It is reportedly only available in Japan. There does not seem to have been any enhancements since it was first introduced in 2005. Though more like the CCI solution than the ClearCube solution, it is less dense and has all cabling out of the front of the unit. Comparison Common value proposition of blade PCs relative to traditional PCs: Enhanced data security because all data can be maintained in the datacenter and can more easily be saved to a mass storage device, so if the access device is stolen or destroyed the data is not compromised Reduced Total Cost of Ownership due to consolidation, standardization, and more redundancy Better disaster tolerance for end users because with MS RDP end users can log in from anywhere to their blade PC, so even if their office is quarantined (due to a contagious disease outbreak, for instance), they can continue to have access to their blade PC and their data files so they remain productive Design considerations As an alternative to traditional PCs, the blade PC solutions offered by the various vendors are effectively competing with PCs, albeit they are based in datacenters. Therefore some of the more important design considerations in this category include: