Ready for blade desktops?

Blade servers, which condense complete servers into quite small spaces, seem to be a growing trend, about which we’ve written before. They make sense, because they take up less space than traditional servers, and they save money by conserving power and being easy to service, manage, and replace.

Similarly, thin clients make sense nowadays because they lower support costs by centralizing virtually all management tasks.

ClearCube Technology, with whom we met last week, has taken the best of both blades and thin clients to fashion a new kind of desktop hardware. Users plug their monitor, mouse, and keyboard into a small desktop interface box. A Category 5 10Base-T cable runs out the back of the box as far as 200 meters to a central location and connects with the equivalent of a desktop computer’s internals living on a blade in a rack in the server room.

From the user’s perspective, there’s no difference between the C/Port interface box and a regular computer except the much smaller size of the box. The latest version of the C/Port supports not only keyboard, video, and mouse, but microphone, speakers, and two USB ports, making each system about as fully functional as a typical beige box.

From an administrator’s viewpoint, however, there’s a big difference. No longer does the support staff have to visit each desktop to diagnose problems or reboot machines. And the suite of software tools bundled with the hardware includes versions of Intel LANDesk Management Suite, LANDesk Client Manager, and PowerQuest DeployCenter, as well as proprietary software designed to work with ClearCube’s hardware, making for a highly manageable configuration.

Blade desktops are also much more secure than traditional desktops. With no external storage devices, users can’t take any information with them. Using the bundled ClearCube Management Console, you can even specify that the clients’ USB ports be enabled for any peripherals except storage devices.

ClearCube promotes high availability for its clients by mirroring clients’ hard drives to invisible partitions on other clients’ drives within a rack (on a scheduled basis — not in real time). If a drive fails, it can be recovered quickly from the most recent snapshot. For the most important users, you can designate a hot spare client within the rack, and via software alone specify that the user is to work on the hot spare in the event of a failure of the user’s primary machine.

All these benefits come at a price, of course. Each blade costs about 10 – 15% more than an equivalent standalone PC. Add to that $400 a seat for each C/Port, plus the cost of the back-end hardware and management software.

However, ClearCube argues (and many third-party studies confirm) that upfront costs are only a small part of the real cost of a system. The cost to deploy and maintain client hardware and software adds up to many times the upfront cost over the lifetime of the system — $3-4,000 per user over a four-year lifetime, according to the company. ClearCube’s system’s scalability (it supports as many as 112 clients in a single rack) and manageability should save more than that, and its flexibility lets ClearCube project its hardware will have twice the lifetime of a typical client — as much as eight years.

ClearCube is the only vendor we’ve seen in this space, which is a mixed blessing for the company. On one hand, it owns what is currently a very small but quickly growing market. (The company claims 100% growth per quarter over the last several quarters.) On the other, it leads one to wonder why other companies don’t jump on the bandwagon if the company has such a good idea.

The answer, according to Chief Marketing Officer Raj Shah, is patents. ClearCube has 41 patents for crucial components of the technology. Running all the necessary signals over a single Category 5 cable is quite a trick. Extending USB to 660 feet alone is a feat no one else has managed. ClearCube’s intellectual property is a formidable barrier to entry to other hardware vendors. Shah indicates, however, that ClearCube would license the technology if approached.

ClearCube isn’t sitting still on its intellectual property, however. Planned improvements include quad-monitor support and a fiber-based extension of the link from the server room to the desktop to a full kilometer in length.

We think ClearCube is onto something. While its desktop blades may seem a little exotic today, their manageability and security features make a compelling argument for your including them on your list of products to test the next time you refresh a base of several dozen desktops.