Archive for March, 2010

Technical Details on the IBM HX5 Blade Server (UPDATED)

March 30, 2010

(Updated 4/22/2010 at 2:44 p.m.) IBM officially announced the HX5 on Tuesday, so I’m going to take the liberty to dig a little deeper in providing details on the blade server. I previously provided a high-level overview of the blade server on this post, so now I want to get a little more technical, courtesy [...]

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Posted in IBM, Intel 21 Comments »

Dell M910 Blade Server – Based on the Nehalem EX

March 30, 2010

Dell appears to be first to the market today with complete details on their Nehalem EX blade server, the PowerEdge M910. Based on the Nehalem EX technology (aka Intel Xeon 7500 Chipset), the server offers quite a lot of horsepower in a small, full-height blade server footprint. Some details about the server: uses Intel Xeon [...]

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Posted in Dell 17 Comments »

Details on Intel’s Nehalem EX (Xeon 7500 and Xeon 6500)

March 30, 2010

Intel is scheduled to “officially” announce today the details of their Nehalem EX CPU platform, although the details have been out for quite a while, however I wanted to highlight some key points. Intel Xeon 7500 Chipset This chipset will be the flagship replacement for the existing Xeon 7400 architecture.  Enhancements include: •Nehalem uarchitecture •8-cores [...]

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Posted in Intel 14 Comments »

HP Blades Helping Make Happy Feet 2 and Mad Max 4

March 26, 2010

Chalk yet another win up for HP.  It was reported last week on www.itnews.com.au that Digital production house Dr. D. Studios is in the early stages of building a supercomputer grid cluster for the rendering of the animated feature film Happy Feet 2 and visual effects in Fury Road the long-anticipated fourth film in the Mad [...]

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Posted in HP 7 Comments »

Blade Server Shoot-Out (Dell/HP/IBM) – InfoWorld.com

March 23, 2010

InfoWorld.com posted on 3/22/2010 the results of a blade server shoot-out between Dell, HP, IBM and Super Micro. I’ll save you some time and help summarize the results of Dell, HP and IBM. The Contenders Dell, HP and IBM each provided blade servers with the Intel Xeon X5670 2.93GHz CPUs and at least 24GB of RAM [...]

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Posted in Dell, HP, IBM, Server Comparisons 11 Comments »

IBM BladeCenter H vs Cisco UCS

March 22, 2010

(From the Archives – September 2009) News Flash: Cisco is now selling servers! Okay – perhaps this isn’t news anymore, but the reality is Cisco has been getting a lot of press lately – from their overwhelming presence at VMworld 2009 to their ongoing cat fight with HP. Since I work for a Solutions Provider [...]

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Posted in Cisco, IBM, Server Comparisons 25 Comments »

Cisco, IBM and HP Update Blade Portfolio with Westmere Processor

March 16, 2010

Intel officially announced today the Xeon 5600 processor, code named “Westmere.” Cisco, HP and IBM also announced their blade servers that have the new processor. The Intel Xeon 5600 offers: 32nm process technology with 50% more threads and cache Improved energy efficiency with support for 1.35V low power memory There will be 4 core and [...]

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Posted in Cisco, HP, IBM 11 Comments »

New IBM Blade Chassis? New Liquid Cooled Blade?

March 15, 2010

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit. I’m a geek. I’m not an uber-geek, but I’m a geek. When things get slow, I like digging around in the U.S. Patent Archives for hints as to what might be coming next in the blade server market place. My latest find uncovered a couple of “interesting” patents [...]

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Posted in IBM 21 Comments »

4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison

March 10, 2010

IMPORTANT NOTE – I updated this blog post on Feb. 28, 2011 with better details.  To view the updated blog post, please go to: http://bladesmadesimple.com/2011/02/4-socket-blade-servers-density-vendor-comparison-2011/ Original Post (March 10, 2010): As the Intel Nehalem EX processor is a couple of weeks away, I wonder what impact it will have in the blade server market.  I’ve [...]

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Posted in Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Server Comparisons 26 Comments »

IDC Q4 2009 Report: Blade Servers STILL Growing, HP Leads STILL Leading in Shares

March 8, 2010

IDC reported on February 24, 2010 that blade server sales for Q4 2009 returned to quarterly revenue growth with factory revenues increasing 30.9% in Q4 2009 year over year (vs 1.2% in Q3.)  For the first time in 2009 there was an 8.3% increase in year-over-year shipments in Q4.  Overall blade servers accounted for $1.8 billion in Q4 [...]

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Posted in HP, IBM, IDC 6 Comments »