Is it time to rethink your position on blade servers? A recent vendor neutral article from Processor.com thinks it is. The October 5th edition of Processor magazine provided an article titled, “Rethink Your Position On Blade Servers” where they offer reasons to look at blade servers in your environment. Continue reading
Category Archives: Server Comparisons
Performance Results – HP BL660c vs Dell M820
A few days ago I compared the HP ProLiant BL660c blade server with the Dell PowerEdge M820, so today I wanted to point you to some performance data. Brian Basset, a Performance Engineer within Dell’s Solutions Performance Analysis group, recently ran some SPEC benchmarks on both the HP BL660c and the Dell M820 and the results were interesting. In summary: Continue reading
HP BL660c vs Dell M820 – A Comparison
If you are a recurring reader to this blog, you’ll know that I work for Dell (1 year as of August 15) which makes me a bit bias toward Dell. However, with the recent announcements of 4 socket blade servers based on Intel’s E5-4600 processor by HP and Dell, I thought it would be interesting to see how they line up. With the attempt to be unbiased, I’ve listed everything I thought was relative about both servers so that you, the reader, could make your own decision about which server would work best in your environment. I welcome any feedback, thoughts or comments below. The data below is from HP and Dell’s websites and is current as of 8.14.12. Continue reading
Blade Chassis I/O Diagrams
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 4 Ethernet modules (in most cases.) In today’s post, I thought I would keep it simple and publish the I/O diagrams of Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM chassis. Of course, I am human and “have been known to make mistakes – from time to time” so please feel free to correct me on any errors you see. Enjoy.
(Updated 8/3/2011 – fixed Dell M1000e Full Height I/O Diagram)
Rack Servers vs Blade Servers – Which is Best?
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 need a lot of local I/O expansion or you don’t have management issues with your physical server environment, you may be better off with rack servers. That being said, there are a lot of benefits to a blade server design as well.
4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison (2011)
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 post, I’ll review the 4 socket Intel and AMD blade servers that are currently on the market. Yes, I know I’ll have to revise this again in a few weeks, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Continue reading
New Study Shows Dell M1000e Chassis Most Power Efficient Chassis
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 decided to take the time to investigate these findings a bit deeper. Continue reading
Back to the Basics
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.
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(UPDATED) The Best Blade Server Option Is…[Part 1 – A Look at Cisco]
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 to you. Based on this, I figured it would be a good exercise to do a high level comparison of the blade chassis offerings from Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM. If you ready through my past blog posts, you’ll see that my goal is to be as unbiased as possible when it comes to talking about blade servers. I’m going to attempt to be “vendor neutral” with this post as well, but I welcome your comments, thoughts and criticisms. Continue reading
(UPDATED) Prize Fight: IBM MAX5 vs Dell FlexMem Bridge
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 unbiased comparison between Dell’s FlexMem Bridge technology (via the PowerEdge 11G M910 blade server) vs IBM’s MAX5 + HX5 blade server offering. In summary both offerings provide the Intel Xeon 7500 CPU plus the ability to add “extended memory” offering value for virtualization, databases and any other workloads that benefit from large amounts of memory. Continue reading