Thinking Inside the Box

The increasing need for high-performance computing, and the growing popularity of cloud computing and related Web 2.0 and SaaS initiatives, are pushing companies to build out their data center infrastructures. But space and power issues not to mention the costs of expansion are primary obstacles. Major hardware manufacturers are offering innovative solutions to address these needs and concerns, packing quad-core compute nodes into blade servers, and packing high-density blade server and storage arrays into mobile containers for quick deployment.