Making blade servers simple
Intel officially announced today the Xeon 5600 processor, code named “Westmere.” Cisco, HP and IBM also announced their blade servers that have the new processor. The Intel Xeon 5600 offers:
32nm process technology with 50% more threads and cache
Improved energy efficiency with support for 1.35V low power memory
There will be 4 core and 6 core offerings. [...]
IDC reported on February 24, 2010 that blade server sales for Q4 2009 returned to quarterly revenue growth with factory revenues increasing 30.9% in Q4 2009 year over year (vs 1.2% in Q3.) For the first time in 2009 there was an 8.3% increase in year-over-year shipments in Q4. Overall blade servers accounted for $1.8 billion in Q4 [...]
Posted in IBM on Mar 4th, 2010
A few weeks ago, IBM and Emulex announced a new blade server adapter for the IBM BladeCenter and IBM System x line, called the “Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter for IBM BladeCenter" (IBM part # 49Y4235). Frequent readers may recall that I had a "so what" attitude when I blogged about it in October and that [...]
Posted in IBM on Mar 2nd, 2010
(UPDATED 11:29 AM EST 3/2/2010)
IBM announced today the BladeCenter® HX5 – their first 4 socket blade since the HS41 blade server. IBM calls the HX5 “a scalable, high-performance blade server with unprecedented compute and memory performance, and flexibility ideal for compute and memory-intensive enterprise workloads.”
The HX5 will have the ability to be coupled with a [...]
Posted in IBM on Mar 2nd, 2010
UPDATED: 3/2/2010 at 12:58 PM EST
Author’s Note: I’m stretching outside of my “blades” theme today so I can capture the entire eX5 messaging.
Finally, all the hype is over. IBM announced today the next evolution of their “Enterprise x-Architecture”, also known as eX5.
Why eX5? Simple: e=Enterprise X=x-Architecture 5=fifth generation.
IBM’s Enterprise x-Architecture has been around for quite a [...]
Posted in Cisco, HP, Server Comparisons on Feb 26th, 2010
Tolly.com announced on 2/25/2010 a new Test Report that compares the network bandwidth scalability between HP BladeSystem c7000 with BL460 G6 Servers and Cisco UCS 5100 with B200 Servers, and the results were interesting. The report simply tested 6 HP blades, with a single Flex-10 Module vs 6 Cisco blades using their Fabric Extender + a single Fabric [...]
Posted in HP on Feb 15th, 2010
I’ve recently posted some rumours about IBM’s upcoming announcements in their blade server line, now it is time to let you know some rumours I’m hearing about HP. NOTE: this is purely speculation, I have no definitive information from HP so this may be false info. That being said – here we go:
Rumour #1: Integration of “CNA” [...]
Posted in IBM on Feb 9th, 2010
IBM officially announced today a new addition to their blade server line – the HS22v. Modeled after the HS22 blade server, the HS22v is touted by IBM as a “high density, high performance blade optimized for virtualization.” So what makes it so great for virtualization? Let’s take a look.
Memory
One of the big differences between the [...]
Cisco is getting some (more) recognition with their UCS blade server product, as they recently achieved the top position for “8 Core Server” on VMware’s VMmark benchmark tool. VMmark is the industry’s first (and only credible) virtualization benchmark for x86-based computers. According to the VMmark website, the Cisco UCS B200 blade server reached a score of 25.06 @ [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 29th, 2010
Okay, I can’t hold back any longer – I have more rumours. The next 45 days is going to be an EXTREMELY busy month with Intel announcing their Westmere EP processor, the predecessor to the Nehalem EP CPU and with the announcement of the Nehalem EX CPU, the predecessor to the Xeon 7400 CPU. I’ll post more [...]
