Making blade servers simple
Posted in Dell on May 19th, 2010
Let’s face it. Virtualization is everywhere. Odds are there is something virtualized in your data center. If not, it soon will be. As more workloads become virtualized, chances are you are going to run out of “capacity” on your virtualization host. When a host’s capacity is exhausted, 99% of the time it is because the host [...]
Posted in Future Technologies on May 17th, 2010
It’s been a while since I’ve posted what rumours I’m hearing, so I thought I’d dig around and see what I can find out. NOTE: this is purely speculation, I have no definitive information from any vendor about any of this information so this may be false info. Read at your own risk.
Posted in Dell on May 13th, 2010
Perhaps one of Dell’s best kept secrets on their 11G servers (blade, rack and tower) is something called Lifecycle Controller. This innovative offering allows a user to configure the hardware, run diagnostics and prep the server for an operating system. “SO WHAT?” you are probably thinking – “HP and IBM have this with their SmartStart [...]
I heard a rumour on Friday that HP has been chosen by another animated movie studio to provide the blade servers to render an upcoming movie. To recount the movies that have used / are using HP blades:
Posted in HP on Apr 27th, 2010
Wow. HP continues its ”blade everything” campaign from 2007 with a new offering today – HP Integrity Superdome 2 on blade servers. Touting a message of a “Mission-Critical Converged Infrastructure” HP is combining the mission critical Superdome 2 architecture with the successful scalable blade architecture.
Posted in Cisco, Dell, IBM, Server Comparisons on Apr 8th, 2010
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 [...]
(Updated 4/22/2010 at 2:44 p.m.) IBM officially announced the HX5 on Tuesday, so I’m going to take the liberty to dig a little deeper in providing details on the blade server. I previously provided a high-level overview of the blade server on this post, so now I want to get a little more technical, courtesy [...]
Posted in Dell on Mar 30th, 2010
Dell appears to be first to the market today with complete details on their Nehalem EX blade server, the PowerEdge M910. Based on the Nehalem EX technology (aka Intel Xeon 7500 Chipset), the server offers quite a lot of horsepower in a small, full-height blade server footprint. Some details about the server: uses Intel Xeon [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I've been working in server platform infrastructure since 1997. I'm certified in HP and IBM Blade Servers, working on Dell.You can contact me at:
LinkedIn: Kevin Houston
Twitter: Kevin_Houston
Email: bladesmadesimple AT gmail DOT com
