http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/23962.wss and the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRZyz1vXkPE&eurl

IBM today announced an entirely new category of server to address the growing Web 2.0 industry.  Today, the companies behind the Internet rely on massive, sprawled out data centers that are pushing the limits of power and space available to them.

This does sound very cool, data center energy costs continue to rise becoming the most important part of your operations costs. Being able to deploy your server infrastructure in an energy efficient way has to be a good thing from a corporate social responsibility standpoint and an operational one.

This does sound interesting, could this be where the blade platform is headed long term?

It’s one step away from the concept of the data center as a service, that I might buy a data center which provides a range of services for a specific time period - where the underlying hardware and infrastructure is abstracted from the infrastructure? We’ll have to see, I’m off to read up on the iDataPlex!