Server Comparisons

Blade Chassis I/O Diagrams

Posted by on July 15, 2011 at 3:38 pm

Many people get confused as to why so many I/O modules are needed within a given blade chassis.  The basic concept is simple (in most cases) – for each port you need on a given blade server, you need to have a corresponding I/O module.  For example, if you need 4 NICs, you’re going to need [...]

Rack Servers vs Blade Servers–Which is Best?

Posted by on June 22, 2011 at 9:04 am

Since the dawn of mankind (or more realistically, the early 2000’s) people have debated whether blade servers or rack servers were best for their datacenter environment.   It may surprise you that I personally don’t believe that blade servers fit everywhere.  In fact, if you aren’t running out of power/cooling, you don’t have space constraints, you [...]

4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison (2011)

Posted by on February 28, 2011 at 10:04 pm

Revised with corrections  3/1/2011 10:29 a.m. (EST) Almost a year ago, I wrote an article highlighting the 4 socket blade server offerings.  At that time, the offerings were very slim, but over the past 11 months, that blog post has received the most hits, so I figured it’s time to revise the article.  In today’s [...]

New Study Shows Dell M1000e Chassis Most Power Efficient Chassis

Posted by on September 16, 2010 at 7:34 pm

A white paper released today by Dell shows that the Dell M1000e blade chassis infrastructure offers significant power savings compared to equivalent HP and IBM blade environments. In fact, the results were audited by an outside source, the Enterprise Management Associates (http://www.enterprisemanagement.com). After the controversy with the Tolly Group report discussing HP vs Cisco, I [...]

Back to the Basics

Posted by on September 2, 2010 at 1:12 pm

The Washington Post has a nice article today from Logan G. Harbaugh of PC World about blade servers. In the article, Logan takes the discussion of blade servers back to the basics. The piece covers the pro’s and con’s of blade servers as well as some good comparisons between blade and rack servers.

(UPDATED) The Best Blade Server Option Is…[Part 1 - A Look at Cisco]

Posted by on August 24, 2010 at 8:57 pm

Updated on 9/13/2010 with link to Sean McGee’s I/O Card Blog Post   One of the questions I get the most is, “which blade server option is best for me?” My honest answer is always, “it depends.” The reality is that the best blade infrastructure for YOU is really going to depend on what is important [...]

(UPDATED) Prize Fight: IBM MAX5 vs Dell FlexMem Bridge

Posted by on May 21, 2010 at 5:07 pm

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 [...]

New Cisco Blade Server: B440-M1

Posted by on April 8, 2010 at 4:39 pm

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 [...]

Blade Server Shoot-Out (Dell/HP/IBM) – InfoWorld.com

Posted by on March 23, 2010 at 2:38 pm

InfoWorld.com posted on 3/22/2010 the results of a blade server shoot-out between Dell, HP, IBM and Super Micro. I’ll save you some time and help summarize the results of Dell, HP and IBM. The Contenders Dell, HP and IBM each provided blade servers with the Intel Xeon X5670 2.93GHz CPUs and at least 24GB of RAM [...]

IBM BladeCenter H vs Cisco UCS

Posted by on March 22, 2010 at 3:05 pm

(From the Archives – September 2009) News Flash: Cisco is now selling servers! Okay – perhaps this isn’t news anymore, but the reality is Cisco has been getting a lot of press lately – from their overwhelming presence at VMworld 2009 to their ongoing cat fight with HP. Since I work for a Solutions Provider [...]