They make it look so complicated in the movies. Detailed covert operations with the intent to hack into a casino’s mainframe preceeded by weeks of staged planned rehearsals, but I’m here to tell you it’s much easier than that.
This is my story of how I had 20 seconds of complete access to The Venetian Casino’s data center, and lived to tell about it.
Along with the Intel blade server announcements, Tuesday HP also announced two new AMD based blades, the BL465c G7 and BL685G7. Although originally viewed as a refresh of their existing AMD blade servers, while at the HP Tech Forum in Las Vegas, I found there were a few interesting facts. Let’s take a look. Continue reading
At the 2010 HP Tech Forum press release on Monday, June 21, 2010, new HP BladeSystem products were announced. In the following video, Mark Potter, Vice President of HP Industry Standard Servers, reveals the newest HP BladeSystem products.
As expected, HP announced today new blade servers to their BladeSystem lineup as well as a new converged switch for their chassis. Everyone expected updates to the BL460 and BL490, the BL2x220c and even the BL680 blade servers, but the BL620 G7 blade server was a surprise (at least to me.) Before I highlight the announcements, I have to preface this by saying I don’t have a lot of technical information yet. I attended the press conference at HP Tech Forum 2010 in Las Vegas, but I didn’t get the press kit in advance. I’ll update this post with links to the Spec Sheets as they become available. Continue reading
Last week, Blade.org invited me to their 3rd Annual Technology Symposium – an online event with speakers from APC, Blade Network Technologies, Emulex, IBM, NetApp, Qlogic and Virtensys. Blade.org is a collaborative organization and developer community focused on accelerating the development and adoption of open blade server platforms. This year’s Symposium focused on “the dynamic data center of the future”. While there were many interesting topics (check out the replay here), the one that appealed to me most was “Shared I/O” by Alex Nicolson, VP and CTO of Emulex. Let me explain why. Continue reading
Dell announced today two new additions to their blade server family – the PowerEdge 11G M710HD and the M610x. The two new servers are just a part of Dell’s “Blade 3.0 Launch” – a campaign highlighting Dell’s ongoing effort to become the leader in blade server technology. Over the next several months, Dell will be making changes in their chassis infrastructure introducing more efficient power supplies and fans that will require Continue reading
(Updated to include links to results)
I’ve had a few questions lately about “the best” blade server to use for virtualization – specifically VMware virtualization. While the obvious answer is “it depends”, I thought it would be an interesting approach to identify the blade servers that ranked in the top 5 in VMware’s VMmark benchmark. Before I begin, let me explain what the VMmark testing is about. Continue reading