> I'm not partial to the current blade servers because many of them (like > the RLX system I played with 6 months ago) end up using cheezy 4200 > RPM laptop disk drives as the main OS disk. Cheezy laptop drives are > simply not fast enough to deal with the large number of IO-bound > applications that bio people typically run. In particular I'd hate to > run BLAST on one of them. I agree with you. Most vendors seem to be going with low-power low-speed CPUs/drives in their blade servers suited more for web server farms than HPC. I guess because of the cooling issues etc. Dell is supposed to be coming out with these http://www.dell.com/us/en/esg/topics/esg_pedge_rackmain_servers_1_pedge_1655 mc.htm some time soon. Maybe it's not the density one would want, but it's definitely a full-power computer. Goran Ceric System Administrator Washington University St. Louis Department of Genetics, Eddy Lab goran@genetics.wustl.edu