Still far away from Larry Allison's dream of putting everybody back behind a dummy terminal, the trend in many institutions goes back towards integration of central processing power for multiple clients. The rationale is that in expanding environments, IT professionals spend more and more time traveling to the job location, even if it is on the other side of the building to maintain and troubleshoot the different workstations and PCs. The solution is to move most client computers to a central location in a controlled environment (cooled, dust-free) and if one of the machines goes down, just do a hot swap and the user is back in business.

ClearCube 8 x micro-blade server rack running in a 4 x configuration at the moment
Up to eight micro-blade server / workstations can be housed in the form factor of a standard desktop PC.

At first glance, this appears like a herculanean effort but upon closer inspection, it is really not that bad since the infrastructure in the form of existing CAT-5 cabling is already in place. The only thing that needs to change is the form factor of the new machines and one of the proposed solutions finding the blessing of Intel (otherwise they wouldn't have been there) was presented by ClearCube. Using rack-mounted micro blade servers stuck vertically into the cage, everything hot-swappable, the ClearCube solution is just a phone call away in case one machine goes down.

Hitachi

Water cooling has become the pet of the thermal designers and the development has not stopped at laptops either. In past years, custom modified laptop water cooling solutions have stuck out their heads occasionally, however, so far, there was no mass produced water-cooled laptop available yet. Hitachi promises to change this and showcased their Silent Water Cooling System. At first glance, in a market driven by lower weight, water cooling appears somewhat awkward, however, the combined weight of the unit is with 100 ml of coolant comparable or even less than most standard cooling solutions. Very nifty, indeed.

A hindsight to make every water-cooling fan's eyes watery
Integrated water-cooling in a Hitachi Silent Water Cooling System.

On the front, it looks and feels like a standard laptop.
The schematics of the cooling setup as shown on the screen are given as close-up on the top.

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