Blade PCs have been attracting firms' interest because of the benefits in security, higher availability, and reduced support and management costs. A blade PC is a client system operated by a single end-user. Like blade servers, they are designed to be rack mounted in a back office. This leaves just the keyboard, monitor and mouse on the user's desk. According to a recent IDC report, firms can save up to 40 percent on operating costs by migrating from conventional desktops to blade PCs.

In June, Anglo-Dutch banking group Insinger de Beaufort announced that it had deployed blade PCs for all staff in its London offices. It chose systems from US-based vendor ClearCube Technology, a pioneer of blade PC architecture.

ClearCube's kit consists of rack-mounted chassis "cages" that hold up to eight Pentium 4 or dual-Xeon blades, linked to desktops via standard Cat 5 cabling. Customers can choose to deploy a c/port onto each user's desk, which simply receives a video signal piped down the cable from its blade host; or an i/port that uses Microsoft's RDP protocol to carry display data in IP packets.

A rival blade PC technology is HP's Consolidated Client Infrastructure (CCI), which uses thin clients as the user console, but the firm does not yet offer this in Europe.

John Bryant, head of IT for Insinger de Beaufort in the UK, said his company had considered a number of alternatives to replace its fleet of ageing desktops. These included new desktops from Dell; a move to thin clients; or even using keyboard, video and mouse (KVM) switches.

"We needed real PCs instead of thin clients because our trading platform is a single-user application - it can't be run 'one for many' on a server," Bryant said. The bank also needed high availability, and ClearCube's system allows for a handful of PC blades to be kept aside as hot spares to which users can be switched quickly in the event of a hardware failure.

"Any downtime for traders is loss of earnings, and leaves us vulnerable to sudden market changes," Bryant explained.

Using blade PCs keeps client systems safely stored in a back office, physically securing the kit from theft and preventing staff from using floppy disks or USB Flash disks to copy files. This centralised arrangement also saves time and money if staff need to be moved, said Bryant. "I can swap two traders over by simply moving patch cables in the server room."

Insinger de Beaufort decided to connect users and blades via the c/port direct cable option because of concerns about the security of IP connections, but also because the users required more than one screen per desk and only the c/port option allowed this.

ClearCube's Ken Knotts said that finance firms often see IP connections as inferior for performance, but they are well suited to many workers' roles. "They're popular in healthcare, for task-oriented or entry-level knowledge workers, or if the blade PCs are hosted a long distance away," he said.