Blades Made Simple

The VMware VMmark web site was recently updated to show Dell’s PowerEdge M910 blade server in the #1 slot (for blades) in the 16 core space. I think the PowerEdge M910 is very intriguing, so I thought I’d spend some time highlighting the features.

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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(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.  [...]

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NOTE: IDC revised their report on May 28, 2010.  This post now includes those changes. IDC reported on May 28, 2010 that worldwide server sales for Q1 2010 factory revenues increased 4.6  4.7% year over year to $10.4 billion in the first quarter of 2010 (1Q10).  They also reported the blade server market accelerated and continued [...]

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Updated 5/24/2010 – I’ve received some comments about expandability and I’ve received a correction about the speed of Dell’s memory, so I’ve updated this post.  You’ll find the corrections / additions below in GREEN. Since I’ve received a lot of comments from my post on the Dell FlexMem Bridge technology, I thought I would  do an [...]

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Let’s face it.  Virtualization is everywhere.   Odds are there is something virtualized in your data center.  If not, it soon will be.  As more workloads become virtualized, chances are you are going to run out of “capacity” on your virtualization host.  When a host’s capacity is exhausted, 99% of the time it is because the host [...]

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Perhaps one of Dell’s best kept secrets on their 11G servers (blade, rack and tower) is something called Lifecycle Controller. This innovative offering allows a user to configure the hardware, run diagnostics and prep the server for an operating system. “SO WHAT?” you are probably thinking – “HP and IBM have this with their SmartStart [...]

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I heard a rumour on Friday that HP has been chosen by another animated movie studio to provide the blade servers to render an upcoming movie. To recount the movies that have used / are using HP blades:

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Cisco recently announced their first blade offering with the Intel Xeon 7500 processor, known as the ”Cisco UCS B440-M1 High-Performance Blade Server.”  This new blade is a full-width blade that offers 2 – 4 Xeon 7500 processors and 32 memory slots, for up to 256GB RAM, as well as 4 hot-swap drive bays.  Since the server is [...]

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