One of the biggest challenges related to blade servers in an existing data center is how to power and cool. APC wrote a white paper (link below) that explains how to asses the options to best power and cool your blade environment.
Monthly Archives: July 2011
Will the New VMware vSphere 5 Licensing Affect Blade Vendors?
As you no doubt heard by now, VMware has announced a new version of vSphere along with some new or improved features however, this post will not highlight these features. In this post, I want to talk about what did not improve – the licensing. Continue reading
Blade Chassis I/O Diagrams
Many people get confused as to why so many I/O modules are needed within a given blade chassis. The basic concept is simple (in most cases) – for each port you need on a given blade server, you need to have a corresponding I/O module. For example, if you need 4 NICs, you’re going to need 4 Ethernet modules (in most cases.) In today’s post, I thought I would keep it simple and publish the I/O diagrams of Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM chassis. Of course, I am human and “have been known to make mistakes – from time to time” so please feel free to correct me on any errors you see. Enjoy.
(Updated 8/3/2011 – fixed Dell M1000e Full Height I/O Diagram)
IBM Offers FREE Blade Chassis Through December (No Purchase Required)
IBM once again is promoting is striving to increase market share by offering customers the chance to get a “free” IBM BladeCenter chassis. The last time they promoted a free chassis was in November, so this year they kicked in the promo effective July 5, 2011. The promotion is for a free chassis – without any purchase, however a chassis without any blades or switches is just a metal box. Regardless, this promotion is a great way to help offset some of the cost to implementation of your blade server project. Continue reading
BladesMadeSimple.com is Looking for Help
Are you passionate about technology? Do you stay up to date on what’s new in the x86 marketplace, especially blade servers? Do you like to work for free? If so, BladesMadeSimple.com could use you!