Over the past year, we've heard a lot about blade servers -- servers contained on a single card that plugs into a rack mount chassis so you can run dozens side by side in a very small space. One prediction I'll make about blade servers is that we'll hear a lot more. Why? Because the economy is slow, server sales are low, and with the dot-com boom now bust, server manufacturers are desperate to find a new excuse to sell more servers. But do we really need them? Servers, like every other piece of tech equipment, go through phases. The best way to understand these phases is, I think, a little diagram drawn up by analyst firm Gartner Group, which they call the Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies. Gartner's diagram maps the visibility of an emerging technology against its maturity; it basically takes us on a little journey through the minds of marketeers. What the diagram tells us is that very early in the life of an emerging technology we reach a place called the Peak of Inflated Expectations. This is where visibility of the emerging technology is very high but it remains very immature, which basically means it is virtually unusable. Following the life of any emerging technology we quickly fall of the edge of the Peak of Inflated Expectations and fall into the Trough of Disillusionment. This is where all the early adopters rush out to buy the hot stuff and find out it's incompatible with just about everything else ever created -- including system administrators. From there it's a long slow haul up the Slope of Enlightenment. I like to think of this as the process of resigning ourselves to the fact that now we've bought the technology and have realised that it's pretty useless for the job we wanted it to do, we have to find a real use for it to justify the expense. That, and the realisation that we will now have to keep buying more, because whatever it is it won't work with anything else.