Vendors Target
The Data Center

It's already been a busy month for product announcements in the data center sector, as some of computing's biggest names are jousting for the hearts, minds and dollars of facility operators. The battle is being joined over efficiency, as data center managers seek to squeeze extra dollars and watts out of every square foot of their computer space.

Last week, Sun Microsystems announced its new vision for data center architecture, which emphasizes improved scalability through distributed computing. "We've created a dynamic system environment that will revolutionize the network," said Scott McNealy, the chairman, president and CEO of Sun. Early media reviews found the plan as long on vision and short on details.

Today IBM raised the stakes in its blade server battle with Hewlett Packard, announcing its thinnest server yet and a big new customer, AOL Time Warner. IBM also says its eServer BladeCenter has a fan in Microsoft, which says it will bring out Microsoft Exchange 2000 software on BladeCenter later this quarter. Hewlett Packard, for its part, challenged IBM's claims that its new server is more compact and squishier than HP's competing product.

If IBM, HP, Microsoft and Sun are putting this much energy into the data center sector, what does that tell us about the future? Perhaps not much. Venders have been known to go overboard chasing markets that never materialized. But it reinforces the profound shift in priorities from the speed-to-market phase of the data center "gold rush," when efficiency sometimes seemed less crucial than having it done yesterday.