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Drilling a little further in to these grand announcements we find that these two behemoths are up to their same tricks. Implementing proprietary hardware and no software. In fact, the hardware that they are implementing is mostly NPIV technology that is widely available today. So what’s the big deal? To me, the big deal is what they didn’t say. These solutions lock the customer in to their proprietary blade formats. There is no support for rack servers. There is no support for other vendors' server hardware. This is a full-blown, proprietary hardware-orientated solution. And oh, by the way, they also fail to mention that for this to work each and every one of these 100 blade chassis have to have access to all of the LUNs in order to share the WWNs across chassis. That adds up to over 1000 SAN ports and even more cables. What a configuration and security nightmare! Look, it’s great that IBM and HP have figured out that IO virtualization is a key element in creating agile infrastructure, but putting out complicated, partial solutions is worse than doing nothing at all. As we’ve said all along here, it takes a new architecture and a new way of looking at things to create a utility computing environment. There must be synchronicity between the hardware and software and to truly be relevant in the data center, the solution must span blades, racks, and hardware vendors. The major hardware vendors have taken a step back towards proprietary hardware centric solutions. Interesting, with our new software products, only Egenera is filling that void today. Quack, Quack.