Category Archives: Lenovo

Blade Server Comparison – September 2018

With the recent release of the Dell EMC PowerEdge MX blade servers, I realized it’s been a year since I’ve updated my blade server comparison chart.  Below is an updated chart to help guide you to the best blade server for your project.  (REVISED December 2018 – fixed drive count on Dell EMC PowerEdge MX servers.  Thanks to Mike Browning for catching it after this many months!)

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Blade Server Options for VMware vSAN ReadyNode

Last July I wrote a blog article showcasing the limited options listed on VMware’s vSAN ReadyNode listing.  Over the past 14 months, that list has grown so instead of updating that older post, I thought I’d provide a consolidated updated list of vSAN ReadyNode blade servers.

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Blade Server Comparison – September 2017

With the recent release of the Intel Xeon SP CPUs, I realized it’s been a year since I’ve updated my blade server comparison chart.  Below is an updated chart to help guide you to the best blade server for your project.

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Lenovo First to Announce Blades with New Intel CPUs

On June 20th, Lenovo released information about their upcoming blade servers built on the upcoming Intel Xeon processor: the two processor ThinkSystem SN550 and the four processor ThinkSystem SN850.  Although there doesn’t appear to be any spec sheets yet on the products, there are a few things that can be extracted from the published 3D tour. Continue reading

Helpful Blade Server Links

Here is a list of blade-related websites that may help you find more information about blade servers.  Since vendors tend to move their sites without notice if you find a dead link, please let me know.  If you have other sites that you think are worthy to remember, email me at “kevin AT bladesmadesimple.com”.
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Storage Options for Blade Servers

As technology trends like software defined storage (SDS) become more adopted in data centers, it will be interesting to see how it will impact the blade server market – especially with current research showing an expectation of growth over the next 5 years.  To succeed, blade server vendors will have to find ways to adopt to changing technology trends- especially SDS.   Continue reading

GPUs and Blade Servers – A Good Idea?

UPDATED 9.23.2016 When looking at the blade server market, the options for GPUs are very limited – in fact only a couple of vendors offer them (more on this later.)  So you have to question, is it a good idea to put a GPU in a blade server?  Let’s review and find out. Continue reading

Blade Server Comparison – June 2016

With the recent release of the Intel Xeon E5 v4 CPUs, I realized it’s been a year since I’ve updated my blade server comparison chart.  Below is an updated chart to help guide you to the best blade server for your project.   Continue reading

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