Dell, IBM and HP "energy efficient" blades are not like Verari
The "tier 1" vendor blades are the same old high margin proprietary lock in as they always were. They are slightly more efficient than the old servers used to be but still no real innovation or change. Whilst "enterprise" customers still buy the story that there is any worthwhile "manageability" or some other made-up-ability difference between the different boxes your processor (Intel / AMD delete as applicable) can be delivered in there will be a market for this overpriced tin. If you want an efficient PSU then specify one.
What Verari and Rackable did was let other customers follow the path demonstrated by those who actually understand large scale manageability. That is, buy the cheapest box you can get for the processor and RAM you want and make it disposable. The problem is that the bank induced economic failure has stopped the rollouts of most of the real scale out users who understood why they didn't need to give their profit margin to a "tier 1" box maker but could buy what they actually needed instead.
Now a "tier 1" vendor can buy Verari and have two options;
1) Replace their "sell tin to Google" division with Verari (if they are Dell)
2) Bury all memory of Verari and keep on flogging the x86 horse whilst the customers will still pay those prices (that will be HP / IBM)
My bet is on (2), what neither of them will do is let regular customers buy this properly commoditised low margin tin that they don't want on the market.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
