Blades Made Simple

The Countdown Begins

Kevin Houston — Mon, 20 May 2013 23:37:07 +0000

On June 4th, Dell will have a big announcement. Stay tuned – full details will be disclosed when the countdown ends…

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com. He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace. Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization. Kevin works for Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global Enterprise market.

Disclaimer: The views presented in this blog are personal views and may or may not reflect any of the contributors’ employer’s positions. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any employer.

Gartner Blade Server Quadrant (April 2013)

Kevin Houston — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:53:51 +0000

Gartner released the annual Magic Quadrant for blade servers last month and it shows significant changes across the leaderboard within the top 4 leading blade server vendors.

The Magic Quadrant is a tool Gartner uses to visually define a given market segment showcasing technology vendors who are leading the market in 4 areas:

leaders – vendor placement based on current market share
visionaries – vendors who, according to Gartner, “will either represent the discontinuous leading edge of the market or will be large vendors with a plan to drive market success through technology innovation and a narrower product portfolio.”
challengers – defined by Gartner as, “vendors with a strong global presence that are focusing their blade strategies on a broad set of target clients, rather than on pure innovation.”
niche players – defined by Gartner as vendors who focus on a “market that addresses specialized “edge” niches of the broader server market well, and this will naturally drive innovation by small vendors that may only address certain geographies, vertical markets (such as HPC or cloud infrastructure) or specific workload situations.”

As we review the outcome of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, we can come to the conclusion that Gartner considers HP the market leader in blade servers with IBM trailing closely behind with Cisco and Dell following at a distant 3rd and 4th position. Gartner reflects that while IBM is close to HP in market share, HP has a better ability to execute.

Gartner’s evaluation criteria definition of ”ability to execute” is rather lengthy, but covers 7 areas:

Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor that compete in/serve the defined market.
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization): Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization’s financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization’s portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor’s capabilities in all pre-sales activities and the structure that supports them.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization’s message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments.

Summary of Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Cisco

Strengths

Global corporation with strong presence in networking
UCS is an enterprise-class platform with good integration of networking, virtualization and management tools, strengthened by ongoing acquisitions that enhance management capability.
Vblock and FlexPod are proven fabric-based infrastructure (FBI) solutions that provide Cisco with cross-selling opportunities to partner organizations
The 2012 acquisition of Cloupia should strengthen Cisco’s management software portfolio.

Cautions

Cisco’s rack-optimized server market share significantly trails that of the established major vendors which limits its opportunity to be recognized as a leading vendor across the entire server market.
Cisco’s strategy is dependent on alliances with storage and management tool vendors
According to Gartner’s report, the perception of Gartner clients is that Cisco and EMC’s close natural partnership appears to be increasingly strained, with both vendors investing in partnerships and acquisitions that compete with the other.
With no presence in the market for multinode servers, Cisco is exposed to the rapid growth of this sector, which is continuing to take business away from low-end blade servers.

Dell

Strengths

As a mainstream, x86 server market leader, Dell has extensive cross-selling opportunities to a large and growing installed base that spans all server platforms including multinode, blades, racks and towers.
The acquisitions of Compellent, Quest Software, Force10 Networks, Gale Technologies and RNA Networks continue to strengthen Dell’s fabric computing message.
Dell is the clear leader in the rapidly growing market for x86-based multinode extreme scale-out servers.
Dell has an aggressive pricing policy and a strong midmarket presence.
Dell has focused innovation in areas such as memory aggregation, general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) support, cooling and virtual I/O.

Cautions

While still in the leaders quadrant, Dell has lost blade market share during the past two years, and is now the No. 4 vendor in most geographic markets.
Despite Dell’s No. 1 or No. 2 position in most x86 market segments, credibility among most enterprise buying centers remains very hard for the vendor to win.
Dell must achieve messaging around the new Active System branding to fully leverage recent acquisitions and establish a viable FBI presence. Their FBI messaging has been confused by overlapping acquisitions, partnerships and branding policy.

Strengths

HP’s blade market share is substantially higher than the competition.
HP has a strong investment in management tools that enable a single point of management across physical and virtual infrastructures (and across blade- and rack-based servers).
HP offers both blade servers and multinode servers that address market needs.
The vendor is committed to its proprietary technology such as Virtual Connect and FlexFabric.

Cautions

HP has made limited progress in 2012 although it has an extensive portfolio of server options.
While Virtual Connect is well-established on blades, the lack of support for rack-based servers creates operational complexity for users who have both form factors, which inhibits capabilities such as live migration and high availability.
Positioning of HP’s generic BladeSystem servers alongside competitive designs is a particular challenge, especially because two-thirds of blade server revenue is driven by the channel and it is relatively easy to create an integrated system experience using separate components.
HP’s Unix revenue has continued to decline through 2012.

IBM

Strengths

IBM has a very broad set of blade chassis options that address many enterprise requirements.
The vendor supports x86 and Power-based blades.
The introduction of a new blade infrastructure, Flex System, should remain viable and strategic for IBM through the decade.
IBM has the opportunity for highly verticalized platforms (both x86 and RISC) that integrate the hardware and software stack for multiple workloads.

Cautions

IBM has gradually lost blade server market share over the past three years.
Fresh speculation about IBM potentially divesting some or all of its x86 server business will create additional concern in the marketplace until the situation is resolved.

To read the full Gartner report, please visit:

http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1FC3J18&ct=130501&st=sb

Past Gartner Magic Quadrants

Here are my previous blog posts on Gartner Magic Quadrants:

http://bladesmadesimple.com/category/gartner-2/

Blade Server Networking Options

Kevin Houston — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 18:18:49 +0000

If you are new to blade servers, you may find there are quite a few options to consider in regards to managing your Ethernet traffic. Some vendors promote the traditional integrated switching, while others promote extending the fabric to a Top of Rack (ToR) device. Each method has its own benefits, so let me explain what those are. Before I get started, although I work for Dell, this blog post is designed to be an un-biased review of the network options available for many blade server vendors.

NOTE: The diagrams shown below only show 8 servers in an effort to simply the explanation. It is not reflective of any one vendor design.

Pass-Thru Modules

Pass-thru modules provide blade servers with point-to-point connectivity very much like you have in rack servers. If an Ethernet cable is not plugged into the corresponding port on the pass-thru module, the server’s port is not active. In the example to the left, port 0 on blades 1, 2 and 3 are active as well as port 1 on blade 4.

Pass-thru modules are ideal for environments that have small budgets (they are cheaper), or environments where the Networking group does not want to manage networking outside of the traditional networking fabric. Since pass-thru modules require a 1:1 server-to-external switch connection, it is the easiest to manage, although it offers no cable consolidation benefits. Dell, IBM and HP have Pass-thru options in their portfolio.

Fabric Extender (FEX) Modules

Fabric Extender, or FEX, modules extend the blade I/O fabric up to a top of rack Cisco Nexus 5xxx or UCS 6xxx device. Unlike the pass-thru module, FEX modules give you the ability to connect all servers to the Ethernet fabric with as little as one cable. The purpose of the FEX module is to allow simplified connectivity into a Cisco fabric allowing the Top of Rack device to see the FEX module as an extension of the fabric. Cisco, Dell, IBM and HP all have FEX options in their portfolio.

Aggregator or Bridge Modules

Aggregator, or Bridge modules are designed to aggregate Ethernet and offer consolidated Ethernet connectivity much like the FEX but unlike the FEX, it has Layer 2 switching at the chassis level which offers intra-chassis communication for the blade servers. Aggregator modules can also connect into a Cisco Nexus 5xxx fabric to take advantage of FCoE Transit and Data Center Bridging (DCB). Dell is currently the only vendor offering Aggregator modules in their portfolio.

Switch Modules

The last category of choices is the integrated switch module. This category has been around since the creation of blade servers. These modules are nearly identical to the traditional top of rack switches but redesigned for use within a blade chassis. Switch modules offer advantages similar to the Aggregator modules listed above but offer additional advantages such as Layer 3 switching, Ethernet speeds up to 40GbE and stacking (a way to connect multiple switches together to offer a single virtual fabric for management.) While switch modules are the most expensive of all networking options, it also offers the most bandwidth, connectivity and performance. Dell, IBM and HP have switch module options in their portfolio.

Hopefully now you understand what your networking options are for blade servers. I’m interested in your thoughts, so feel free to leave your comments below.

New Interactive Demo for Dell PowerEdge Servers

Kevin Houston — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:06:43 +0000

Warning, Dell marketing pitch follows…

“Get a closer look at Dell’s 12th Generation PowerEdge Server portfolio and explore the innovative technologies inside the servers with the new Dell Interactive Rack, Tower and Blade server 3D demo tool. Now you are able to turn, spin, and pull outs components of our servers via their laptop, tablet, phone or touchscreen display. Simply go online or download the new Interactive tool and you are ready to begin.”

Okay, now that is out of the way – why should you care? Honestly, you shouldn’t unless you the type that wants to see technology before you try it out, or buy it. This new tool from Dell gives you the ability to do almost everything you could with a real server. I like this tool and find it useful in educating customers on Dell’s blade and I/O module portfolio – especially C-Level executives who may not have time to tour a Solutions Center. Best of all, this tool is free to both customers and competitors alike. Since it is web based, as new Dell products come out, you’ll be able to find it in this tool, so keep it bookmarked.

Here are the links to the tool:

–Enterprise Demo Landing Page: www.dellenterprisedemos.com (includes links to the server pages as well as some SAP HANA and Data Warehousing demos)

–Rack and Tower Server: www.dellserverdemo.com

–Blade Servers: www.bladeserverdemo.com

I’d be curious to know your thoughts – and if you know of any other tools like this from HP, IBM, Cisco, etc. please let me know and I’ll publish some info about them as well.

Disclaimer: The views presented in this blog are personal views and may or may not reflect any of the contributors’ employer’s positions. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any employer.

IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker – Q4 2012 Results

Kevin Houston — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 03:25:38 +0000

IDC released their Q4 server numbers on Wednesday. Here is a quick summary of the findings – for a full summary, read the full report via the link at the bottom.

Worldwide Server Data

factory revenue in the worldwide server market increased 3.1% year over year to $14.6 billion
server shipments decreased 3.9% to 2.1 million units
volume systems and high-end systems experienced 4.2% and 6.4% revenue growth to $9.1 billion and $4.1 billion respectively

x86 Industry Standard Server Market Dynamics

x86 server market increased 6.0% in the quarter to $9.7 billion worldwide
x86 unit shipments decreased 3.7% to 2.1 million servers
x86 sales accounted for 66.2% of all server spend
HP’s x86 factory revenue increased 4.4% to 32.7% share
Dell’s x86 factory revenue increased 5.7% to 22.9%share
IBM’s x86 factory revenue came in at 16.7% share
Cisco’s x86 factory revenue came in at 5% share

Blade Server Market Results
IDC included density optimized servers and blade servers under the category of “modular form factor” so here are the details on blade servers:

blade servers grew 3.3% year over year to $2.4 billion
blades now account for 16.3% of total server revenue
HP’s blade revenue share came in at 44.7%
IBM’s blade revenue share came in at 21.7%
Cisco’s blade revenue share came in at 15.3% share

To read the full IDC report, visit http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23974913

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com. He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace. Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization. Kevin works for Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global 500 market.

5 Reasons You May NOT Want Blade Servers

Kevin Houston — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 06:10:58 +0000

Contrary to popular belief and growing market share, blade servers are NOT for everyone. You may be surprised to hear that from a site that focuses only on blade servers, but the reality is, there are a few situations that don’t warrant blade servers. Here’s the top 5 reasons you may not want blade servers.

Reason #1 – Space is Not a Concern

If you have a data center full of empty racks and space is not a concern, then blade servers may not be for you. At first, this may seem logical, but then I ask you, are you virtualizing at all? If so, why? You have plenty of space – so why not run each workload on its own individual server? You probably virtualize for several reasons, a few of which are ease of management and consolidation. The same reasoning could be applied toward running blade servers. You’ll have an easier way to manage your physical servers while consolidating network and storage ports which in turn lower your operational expenses.

Reason #2 – Power & Cooling is Not a Concern

I love talking to I.T. people who think that power doesn’t matter. It probably doesn’t matter to them but believe me – someone in the organization cares about power. In fact, even power companies care about their power usage in data centers. Even if you don’t see the power bill, consider comparing the power requirements for blade servers with those of your existing rack servers. When it comes to the topic of power/cooling and blade servers, many people disbelieve that blade servers can actually require less power/cooling than rack servers. The truth of the matter is they can – with the right economies of scale. A recent paper by Principled Technologies showed an example of 2U servers vs blade servers where a rack of 2U servers (20 servers) = 8kW of power. In comparison, 32 blade servers would only require 6.66kW of power offering a 1.4kW of savings. This translates to $1k per year of power savings. Imagine telling your CFO that you have a way to save a few $k per year…

Reason #3 – Your Networking Team Won’t Allow Switching in a Blade Chassis

Unfortunately, there are organizations where the networking group dictates every protocol that involves the network. The reality is there are political battles you just can’t win, but when you at the economics of using blade servers, I don’t understand why networking folks don’t want to use blade servers. Let’s assume a 48-port top of rack converged switch has a list price of $24,857. That equates to a price-per-port of $519. Looking at the ports required at the top of rack switch device, a rack of 20 x 2U servers would cost $10,357 whereas a chassis of blade servers would cost as low as $1036. Critics would argue that you are adding a layer of complexity to the network fabric, however there are devices like I/O Aggregators that can bridge the chassis network and top of rack network to reduce complexities, so don’t give up on blade servers just yet.

Reason #4 – You Can’t Have a Single Point of Failure

This is a serious concern that many organizations have. When discussing blade servers to customers, I sometimes get asked – isn’t the midplane of a chassis a single point of failure? The real answer is – yes. I don’t care what blade server vendor you look at, the midplane is the single point of failure in any case, simply because if it fails, you’ have to take the blade servers offline in order to service it. In all reality, IF a midplane is going to fail, it’ll fail out of the factory. Very rarely will it fail after years of being in service because the midplane is nothing but copper traces, so nothing short of a bolt of lightening should affect it. In my experiences, those customers who are concerned about the reliability of blade servers will split workloads across multiple blade chassis which insures that if there is an outage, they are protected. If this idea doesn’t seem to satisfy your concern, then stick with rack servers. (Like I said in the beginning– blade servers aren’t for everyone.)

Reason # 5 – Your I/O Requirements Exceed the Limits of Blade Servers

This is another valid concern that I see often. If your environment requires 8 x Fibre channel ports and 10 x 10GbE ports, then blade servers may not be a fit. But then again, do you really need that much I/O, or are the requirements set by a software vendor who tells everyone they need that much I/O. Also, consider looking at combining the Fibre and Ethernet workloads into a single, converged fabric. It’s a popular new trend and everyone is doing it…

In summary, there are real reasons that may necessitate using a server infrastructure other than blades, but my plea to you is – give blade servers a chance. Find your nearest blade server vendor or reseller and ask for a blade server evaluation. Blade servers will save you money and time and at the end of the day you might find that you actually like them.

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Best Practices for Using the Dell Force10 MXL in Cisco Nexus Environments

Kevin Houston — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 15:50:35 +0000

One of the best offerings that Dell has within their blade server I/O portfolio is the Dell Force10 10/40 GbE MXL Switch Module. You can check out the full details on my earlier blog post, but at a high level, this switch provides 32 x 10GbE ports downstream to the blade servers while offering up to 6 x 40GbE ports up stream. In addition, up to (6) MXL switch IOMs can be stacked using ring or daisy-chain topology giving it a stacking bandwidth upstream of 320G all while providing intra-chassis communication allowing servers to talk to each other without going out to the Access layer. But, if you have a Cisco network, will this work? Believe it or not, Dell and Cisco can play nice together.

The engineers at Dell recently released an easy-to-use guide of recommended basic deployment practices for the Dell Force10 MXL in the access layer of a Cisco Nexus network environment. I have to warn you though – it’s not for the faint at heart, as it includes detailed command line verbage on how to set it up. If you know what the command ” # feature enable vpc” does within NX-OS, you’ll appreciate this document. The guide is broken up topically as follows:

the and concepts of MXL switch deployment
introduction to the Force10 MXL hardware and its connectivity and management options
the first steps of MXL deployment (including a rapid introduction to some common MXL initial deployment tasks)
downlink (server-side) configuration options
Link Aggregation Group Configuration
Uplink configuration options to the Cisco Nexus network environment: running PVST with discreet LAGs nd running PVST with a single LAG connected across two top-of-rack switches that are using a Multi-chassis LAG

If you have a Cisco Nexus network, take a few minutes to see how easy it is to add a Dell Force10 MXL into your environment. You might just be surprised at what you find.

Download the complete whitepaper titled, “Deploying the Dell Force10 MXL into a Cisco Nexus Network Environment” at http://bit.ly/DellMXLonNexus

Intel’s Advancements Lead to the Future of the Data Center

Kevin Houston — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 04:54:44 +0000

A little over a year ago, I wrote an article titled, “Why Blade Servers Will be the Core of Future Data Centers” where I coined the name ”Rackplane” which described the concept of future data centers designed with rack sized systems capable of having blade server like compute, memory, I/O, network and storage nodes all communicating at high speeds. While my vision is pure speculation (and was imagined before my current employment with Dell), Intel and Facebook seem to be creating a vision of the future of data centers that is similar to mine. Intel Corporation announced a collaboration with Facebook to define the next generation of rack technologies used to power the world’s largest data centers. According to Intel’s Chief Technology Officer, Justin Rattner, ““Intel and Facebook are collaborating on a new disaggregated, rack-scale server architecture that enables independent upgrading of compute, network and storage subsystems that will define the future of mega-datacenter designs for the next decade.” According to the CTO, “The disaggregated rack architecture includes Intel’s new photonic architecture, based on high-bandwidth, 100Gbps Intel® Silicon Photonics Technology, that enables fewer cables, increased bandwidth, farther reach and extreme power efficiency compared to today’s copper based interconnects.”

According to Wikipedia, Silicon Photonics, or Si Photonics, is the study and application of photonic systems which use silicon as an optical medium. In December of 2008, Intel Labs researchers announced they made advancements in the field of Silicon Photonics by achieving world-record performance using a silicon-based Avalanche Photodetector (APD) which are optical devices that sense light and amplify signals. Without digging into the details, the report from Intel in 2008 provided a breakthrough that creates the possibility of using APDs for 40 Gbps optical communication links replacing copper as found in today’s motherboards.

Learn more about Intel’s APD breakthrough by reading the Nature journal article, or view the explanatory animation.

BladesMadeSimple – Year in Review

Kevin Houston — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 05:23:17 +0000

I’d like to begin 2013 first by saying thank you to you, the reader. I created BladesMadeSimple.com in October of 2009 with the goal of creating a repository of blade server related material for my own use modeled after Rich Bramley’s virtualization blog, vmetc.com. About 3 months after creation of the inception, BladesMadeSimple gained industry visibility after I wrote the blog post titled,

“The Hit Movie, AVATAR Processed on HP Blade Servers” which showcased HP’s blade server involvement with the movie Avatar. Since then, I’ve strived to keep the information on this site fresh while attempting to be vendor neutral. Obviously since I took employment by Dell in August 2011, it’s been very challenging to create fresh blade server content that was “neutral”, so in 2012 I posted the need for contributors to help write about HP, Cisco and IBM. Fortunately I received help from several contributing writers. A special thanks goes out to Chris Fricke (Twitter: @sysgeekguy), Thales Osterne, Dwayne Lessner (Twitter: @dlink7) and Daniel Bowers (Twitter: @Daniel_Bowers).

The Year in Review

In preparation for writing the blog, I took a look at the # of visitors BladesMadeSimple had in 2012 and I was quite surprised. We went from 227,202 visitors in 2011 to 247,313! Honestly, I was shooting for 250k but I dropped the ball in December and didn’t provide any new content, so the # of visits suffered. Oh well, now we have a goal for 2013, right?

If you are interested in what the top blog articles were, here is a list of the top 10, ranked in order of views:

Looking Toward 2013

I have every intention of continuing BladesMadeSimple.com, but I can’t do it without your help. NO, this isn’t a cry for money. Honestly, the site costs me a few $ a day to run, so I pay for it out of my pocket – what I need from you are ideas. If you come across an article that you think would be a good topic for this site, send it my way. If you know of a new product release that needs to be showcased, let me know.

Another way you can help is by being a contributor. I’m still looking for people willing to write new blog content – especially if you’ve got experience with HP, IBM or Cisco, so ping me if you are interested. (It’s strictly a volunteer gig, so if you are looking for $$ move on.) All I ask is that you are passionate and knowledgeable about blade servers. If you meet these criteria, we could use you, so shoot me a note.

BladesMadeSimple is YOUR site. I’m writing to provide content that YOU want to see, so if I’m missing the mark, let me know. If I write something that you don’t agree with, let me know. I welcome any comments, thoughts or suggestions.

Thanks for a great 2012 and I hope you’ll continue to read BladesMadeSimple.com in 2013.

Comparison of x86 Blade Servers

Kevin Houston — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 20:28:29 +0000

(UPDATED 12.31.2012) I often find myself seeking basic information for competitive blade servers, so I decided to sit down and put together a basic list of blade server details for Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM blade servers. The details provided are based on information publicly available and may be subject to errors. I hope that if you do find information in the charts below you’ll let me know either via email or in the comments section. If there are additional areas that you think need to be added to this chart, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. I write these posts as a hobby so my time is limited to my availability. Let me know what you think. Enjoy.

UPDATE: After releasing the initial version, one of my followers, Jae Ellers (@jellers) brought to my attention my calculations for the Dell, HP and IBM racks were off. I accidently multiplied by 7 instead of 4 chassis per rack. Sorry for any confusion this caused and thanks to Mr. Ellers for pointing this out.

Download the full comparison (REVISED 12.31.2012):

BladesMadeSimple.com_x86_Blade_Server_Comparison(updated12.31.2012) – 118KB, Adobe PDF