Making blade servers simple
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 6 core offerings. [...]
Posted in Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Server Comparisons on Mar 10th, 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 been talking about IBM’s HX5 blade server for several months now, so it is very clear that the blade server vendors will be developing blades that will have some iteration [...]
Posted in Cisco, HP, Server Comparisons on Feb 26th, 2010
Tolly.com announced on 2/25/2010 a new Test Report that compares the network bandwidth scalability between HP BladeSystem c7000 with BL460 G6 Servers and Cisco UCS 5100 with B200 Servers, and the results were interesting. The report simply tested 6 HP blades, with a single Flex-10 Module vs 6 Cisco blades using their Fabric Extender + a single Fabric [...]
I wanted to post a few more rumours before I head out to HP in Houston for “HP Blades and Infrastructure Software Tech Day 2010″ so it’s not to appear that I got the info from HP. NOTE: this is purely speculation, I have no definitive information from HP so this may be false info.
First [...]
Posted in Cisco on Feb 16th, 2010
ViewYonder.com recently posted a great write up on some things that Cisco’s UCS can do that IBM, Dell or HP really can’t. You can go to ViewYonder.com to read the full article, but here are 10 things that Cisco’s UCS Polices do:
Chassis Discovery – allows you to decide how many links you should use from the [...]
Cisco is getting some (more) recognition with their UCS blade server product, as they recently achieved the top position for “8 Core Server” on VMware’s VMmark benchmark tool. VMmark is the industry’s first (and only credible) virtualization benchmark for x86-based computers. According to the VMmark website, the Cisco UCS B200 blade server reached a score of 25.06 @ [...]
Posted in Cisco on Jan 22nd, 2010
UPDATED 1/22/2010 with new pictures
Cisco UCS B250 M1 Extended Memory Blade Server
Cisco’s UCS server line is already getting lots of press, but one of the biggest interests is their upcoming Cisco UCS B250 M1 Blade Server. This server is a full-width server occupying two of the 8 server slots available in a single Cisco UCS 5108 blade [...]
Happy New Year to all of my readers. As we enter a new decade, I wanted to give everyone who takes the time to read a few stats on how I’ve done since my inaugural posting on September 23, 2009. First a bit of a background. My main website is now located at BladesMadeSimple.com, however [...]
In an unusual move Tuesday, Cisco CEO, John Chambers, commented that Cisco is still open to a blade server “partnership” with IBM. “I still firmly believe that it’s in IBM’s best interests to work with us. That door will always be open,” Chambers told the audience at the Cisco’s financial analyst conference yesterday at Cisco’s [...]
IDC reported on Wednesday that blade server sales for Q3 2009 returned to quarterly revenue growth with factory revenues increasing 1.2% year over year. However there was a 14.0% year-over-year shipment decline. Overall blade servers accounted for $1.4 billion in Q3 2009 which represented 13.6% of the overall server revenue. Of the top 5 OEM blade manufacturers, IBM [...]
