Yearly Archives: 2015

IDC Worldwide Server Tracker Shows 5.1% Growth in Q3 2015

IDC published their Q3 2015 findings last week, and the results were overall positive.  In year over year revenues, the worldwide server market saw revenues increase of 5.1%, or $13.4 billion, the sixth consecutive quarter of growth while shipments grew 4.5%, or 2.49 million units.  Specific to blade servers, IDC reported Dell’s blade server revenue grew faster than that of any of the top 5 vendors at 34.8%, however Cisco remained at the #2 blade server market share holder behind HP. Continue reading

HP Introduces M.2 SSDs for Blade Servers

HP M2 Solid State Enablement Kit for BladesHP recently announced the industry’s first M.2 SSD for blade servers.  If you’re not familiar with M.2 (pronounced M dot 2), it’s a small form factor card and connector supporting applications such as Wi-Fi, WWAN, USB, PCIe & SATA seen mostly in desktop / laptop systems.  Adoption of this form factor in Tier 1 vendors is slow coming, which is why this is a big announcement for HP.  Since this plugs into the system board, it avoids traversing the SAS mid-plane and allows for connectivity to the system PCIe bus supporting faster speeds (see below for details.) Continue reading

5 Modes of the Dell FN IO Module

Dell FN IO Module for FX2 ChassisDell’s FN I/O Modules (FN IOMs) are integrated devices that sit in the rear of the FX2 chassis and behave like traditional network switches.  The FN IOMs provide 8 x 10GbE internal ports to the connected server nodes while offering 4 x 10GbE external links for upstream connectivity.  What makes the FN I/O Module unique is that it supports 5 operational modes: Standalone (SMUX), VLT, Stacking, Programmable MUX (PMUX) and Full-switch.  Below are details on each of these modes.

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Websites You Need to Bookmark

One of my ongoing goals with this blog is to be a site for all things blade servers however it can be challenging for me to provide all of the information you may need.  Because of this, I created a page dedicated to providing you with a list of helpful websites that you will want to bookmark. Continue reading

Dell MXL Blade Switch Configuration with Explanations

We go through a lot to train our teams on how to configure blade switches however  it can be difficult for one to remember everything that a Dell Network Sales Engineer has taught them.  As an administrator, you often need to be able to look at an actual configuration in front of you and have each line explained to you in as much detail as is reasonable or “necessary.” Continue reading