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Sprawling data centers replete with rogue servers, departmental turf wars and multivendor, multimigraine installations are elevating IT stress levels, leading many of us to ask: ˙How can we do this better?"

The short answer: Fix it so you manage fewer devices.

Don't get us wrong. We like a few racks' worth of beefy hardware as much as the next geek, but it's time to embrace the "C" word--consolidation--specifically, server consolidation. It's a concept whose time has come. A recent survey of 475 Gartner Data Center Conference attendees showed that 92 percent were considering or implementing some type of server consolidation. Whether you choose racks of 1U devices, virtual servers or blades, you'll reap benefits, including easier management and cost savings.

In "Pitching Blades,", we zero in on the blade market, which will grow to $3.5 billion by 2006, according to Imex Research. Sixty-two percent of Gartner conference attendees polled said they had installed or were considering blade servers. The Big 3 server vendors--Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard and IBM--have all released blade-server products in hopes of capturing a piece of that expanding market. Original plans for backplane integration were to include InfiniBand, but the InfiniBand market has failed to take off. We predict the technology steamroller called Ethernet will prevail against newer technology in the blade-server market, as it has in other areas.