With IT budgets increasingly under pressure, a lot more attention is now being paid to physical server sprawl.

Of course, virtualization has been a boon to IT organizations looking to reduce the number of severs they have in place. But the value of virtualization thus far has been pretty much limited to file servers. Things like database servers don't tend to take to virtualization because too often the virtualization layer adds a layer of additional software that can adversely affect performance.

And even if you can reduce the number of physical servers you have in place thanks to virtualization, you still wind up managing a lot more virtual than physical servers. And as we all know, the real cost in enterprise computing is not in the hardware, but rather all the people it takes to manage hardware products that all have different management schemes.

That's why it's with interest we're watching recent developments around Hewlett-Packard, Critical Links and Untangle.

HP this week launched an Adaptive Infrastructure in a Box for Midsize Business offering that combines what were once several separate servers into a single box running Windows Server 20008.

Based on a blade server architecture, the core idea behind these servers has been a long time in coming given when vendors first started rolling out blade servers. What HP has done is dedicated specific processors inside the blade server to handling specific functions in order to eliminate the need for specialized server appliances.

Similarly, Critical Links has leveraged open source technologies to create an all-in-one EdgeBox network server that combines telephony, firewall, router, wireless access point, file and print server, web and electronic mail server, unified threat management and traffic prioritization technologies in a single server.

Untangle this week, meanwhile, took a software-only approach to a similar set of server sprawl problems. The company launched an application, called Re-Router Technology, which turns a basic Windows PC into a network gateway. The basic idea is that the network gateway can then be used to host, for example, all the security software need to protect any PC in that system without requiring the customer to deploy security appliances everywhere.

Ultimately, all of these new approaches to servers should allow IT organizations to be able to manage a lot more devices through a single interface. It also means that IT services companies should be able to mange a lot more IT functions for less.

This trend is only going to accelerate with the advent of multicore processors. Rather than using each core to run an given application faster, we're going to see more server architectures where specific core are dedicated to running specific functions.

All of this means we should see fewer physical servers in the years ahead. The challenge, of course, is coming up with common interfaces that will allow us to more easily manage diverse sets of functions running on the same server.

But once that begins to happen, the total cost of enterprise computing should drop as the number of people needed to mange server environments starts to reflect new server architectures that can now deliver specific IT function a lot more efficiently.