* LATEST SMALL BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY COLUMN:

Blades head downmarket

If you're drooling over the advances in the world of blade servers, wishing you could afford a rack or two of them, that day may arrive sooner than you think. Looking to replace the jumble of servers stacked in the storage closet, er, server room? Don't have a fancy raised floor and heavy duty air conditioner? No problem.

Of course, if you read about the heavy power requirements for a rack full of blades, such as three phase power modules, you figure blades will elude you forever. When you read about problems large companies have cooling a cabinet full of 64 blade servers, all with two processors and 32GBs of RAM generating heat like the August sun, you may be glad to avoid such headaches.

To read Gaskin's column in its entirety, please click here.

* LATEST SMB NEWS NOTES:

Fred and Phishing
I talked a few weeks ago about training "Fred" to be your designated phishing filter. When any user gets a suspicious e-mail, they forward it to Fred. This is not in lieu of real security software, of course, just a way to stay ahead of phishing attempts.

Stable SaaS
Some companies hesitate to trust Software as a Service products. One reason is stability, because they don't know anything about the vendor's data center. An SaaS vendor I don't know, Inkling, made news by declaring they trust a specialized hosting vendor to, essentially, run their entire company.

PC Futures
PCWorld, as you might expect, focuses on the PC, so their article called Your PC in 2008 and Beyond focuses on hardware almost completely. But unless you specialize in video production, complex architectural drawings, or some other niche field like movie special effects or geothermal analysis, PC power isn't your problem: crummy software, poor collaboration tools, and data management are your problems.

James Gaskin writes books (16 so far), articles and jokes about technology and real life from his home office in the Dallas area.