http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/969291

Gartner Dataquest (Quote) Tuesday said worldwide blade server shipments will increase dramatically, growing from the 84,810 units it expects will ship in 2002 to more than 1 million in 2006. The IT research firm also anticipates that revenue from blades will reach at least $1.2 billion during this time.

With the major hardware vendors now jumping on the server blade bandwagon, blades are becoming big business and are one of the few segments of the server market still experiencing rapid growth.

“For vendors to gain any competitive advantage and enjoy market share from this cycle disruption, the blade product offering must include demonstrable advantages for customers over rack-optimized servers,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, principal analyst covering servers for Gartner Dataquest’s Computing Platform Worldwide group.

It will be interesting to see how we can start using blades more, how the technology will evolve, I still think they’re a great way of hosting ESX for virtualization projects, the article discusses blade servers and where they’re going, check it out.