Yearly Archives: 2012

IDC Q3 2012 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market decreased 4.0% year over year to $12.2 billion in the third quarter of 2012 (3Q12). This is the fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue decline, as server market demand continued to soften following a strong refresh cycle that characterized the market in most of 2010 and 2011. After declining in 2Q12, server unit shipments increased 0.6% year over year in 3Q12 to 2.1 million units. This was the 11th time in the past 12 quarters that server units have grown on a year-over-year basis.

To read the full press release, which includes a table showing worldwide shipments, blade and rack server market share, and growth for the top 5 server vendors, please go to http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23808612

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.  Kevin works for Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global 500 market.

Can Blade Servers Make the Disney-Lucasfilm Merger Successful?

Disney-LucasFilm

In an early Halloween treat, Disney announced on Tuesday the intent to buy Lucasfilm for $4 billion dollars.  Even more surprising, was the unveiling that a long-awaited, but never expected sequel to the Star Wars saga, Episode VII, is in “early stage development” to be released by 2015.  While many fans are excited to see new life breathed into the Star Wars franchise, early doubters fear that Disney will do more harm than good.  Regardless of opinions, there is no doubt in my mind that blade server technology will be an important part of the success of this new merger.

Continue reading →

Is it Time to Rethink Your Position On Blade Servers?

Is it time to rethink your position on blade servers?  A recent vendor neutral article from Processor.com thinks it is.  The October 5th edition of Processor magazine provided an article titled, “Rethink Your Position On Blade Servers” where they offer reasons to look at blade servers in your environment.   Continue reading →

First Look–Dell PowerEdge M I/O Aggregator

[updated 10.11.2012] In many data centers, rack servers offer organizations the ability to keep server and networking responsibilities separated. However, when blade servers are introduced into an environment, the server and network admins roles start to blur. Should the server admin have to learn networking, or should the networking admin have to learn blade servers? Continue reading →

Dell Scores Editor’s Choice Award from InfoWorld

InfoWorld Editors Choice Award LogoInfoWorld.com’s Test Center awarded Dell’s blade server portfolio the “Editor’s Choice” award today.  Senior Contributing Editor, Paul Venezia, says, ” From a purely hardware perspective, the Dell PowerEdge M1000e is quite a compelling system. Continue reading →

IDC Worldwide Server Tracker for Q2 2012 Shows Blades Continue to Grow

IDC came out with their Q2 2012 worldwide server market revenue report on August 28, 2012 which shows that a 4.3% drop in server revenues worldwide, marking the third straight quarter of decline. Continue reading →

Performance Results – HP BL660c vs Dell M820

A few days ago I compared the HP ProLiant BL660c blade server with the Dell PowerEdge M820, so today I wanted to point you to some performance data.  Brian Basset, a Performance Engineer within Dell’s Solutions Performance Analysis group, recently ran some SPEC benchmarks on both the HP BL660c and the Dell M820 and the results were interesting.  In summary: Continue reading →

HP BL660c vs Dell M820 – A Comparison

If you are a recurring reader to this blog, you’ll know that I work for Dell (1 year as of August 15) which makes me a bit bias toward Dell.  However, with the recent announcements of 4 socket blade servers based on Intel’s E5-4600 processor by HP and Dell, I thought it would be interesting to see how they line up.  With the attempt to be unbiased, I’ve listed everything I thought was relative about both servers so that you, the reader, could make your own decision about which server would work best in your environment.  I welcome any feedback, thoughts or comments below.  The data below is from HP and Dell’s websites and is current as of 8.14.12. Continue reading →