Category Archives: Server Comparisons

Available 4th Gen Intel Xeon CPUs by Blade Server Vendor

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything new.  This is partly because blade server news has practically diminished; or I’m just getting really bad at finding “blog-worthy” content.  Either way, in this post, I thought it would be helpful to take to post a comparison of CPUs by blade server vendor. Continue reading

Are Multi-Node Systems a Better Option Than Blade Servers?

Lately I’ve been having discussions around “futures” with customers and one topic continues to be over ongoing interest.  What will blade servers look like with the expectations of CPU TDPs continuing to increase?  Looking into the future, it’s very clear that CPUs are going to create an obstacle for blade server users.  TDPs are going to grow to the point where “air cooling” may not be sufficient for all workloads.  This will force blade server users to make a choice.  Continue reading

Blade Server Comparison – August 2019

Below is an updated chart to help guide you to the best blade server for your project.  This version includes Intel DC Persistent Memory (Optane).

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Overview of the Industry Top Blade Chassis

It occurred to me that I created a reference chart for showing what blade server options are available in the market (“Blade Server Comparison – 2018“) but I’ve never listed the options for blade server chassis.  In this post, I’ll provide you with overviews of blade chassis from Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo.  One of the things I’m not going to do is try and give Pro’s and Con’s for each chassis.  The reason is quite obvious if you have read this blog before, but in a nutshell, I work for Dell EMC, so I’m not going to promote or bash any vendor.  My goal is to simplify each vendor’s offerings and give you one place to get an overview of each blade chassis in the market.

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UCS vs PowerEdge MX – Comparison of Admin Tasks

Principled Technologies released a report earlier this month that compared certain administrative tasks between a Cisco UCS blade server solution and a Dell EMC PowerEdge MX solution and the results were quite surprising. Continue reading

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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New Study Compares Networking Capabilities of Blade Server Solutions

An independent testing company, Principled Technologies, recently released a study that compared the networking capabilities of Dell EMC PowerEdge MX, HPE Synergy and Cisco UCS using VMware vMotion.  Their findings:

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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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Vblocks Will Continue to Use UCS

As the new year kicks off, Dell EMC leadership has made it clear that the partnership with Cisco is as strong as always.  Cisco’s UCS is the compute layer of the Dell EMC Vblock so many wondered if there would be a “Dblock” or something similar using the PowerEdge blade server product from the former VCE group and the answer is an astounding “NO!”  (In case you missed it, check out Chad Sakac‘s blog post, “Vblock and VxBlock Use Cisco UCS.  Got it?“)   Continue reading