Making blade servers simple
Posted in Power on Jul 25th, 2011
One of the biggest challenges related to blade servers in an existing data center is how to power and cool. APC wrote a white paper (link below) that explains how to asses the options to best power and cool your blade environment.
As you no doubt heard by now, VMware has announced a new version of vSphere along with some new or improved features however, this post will not highlight these features. In this post, I want to talk about what did not improve – the licensing.
Posted in Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Server Comparisons on Jul 15th, 2011
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 [...]
Posted in IBM on Jul 13th, 2011
IBM once again is promoting is striving to increase market share by offering customers the chance to get a “free” IBM BladeCenter chassis. The last time they promoted a free chassis was in November, so this year they kicked in the promo effective July 5, 2011. The promotion is for a free chassis – without any purchase, however [...]
Posted in Server Comparisons on Jun 22nd, 2011
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 [...]
If you are like me, you are constantly referring to manufacture web sites for product specs, available options, etc. Today, I’ve put together a list of web sites that will help streamline your search. Since links change and new ones get added, I’ve put out a “helpful links” tab at the top of my blog [...]
Posted in Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, IDC, Market Analysis on May 24th, 2011
May 24, 2011 - IDC came out with their 1Q 2011 worldwide server market revenue report today showing that Cisco has finally entered the market standings with a 3rd place standing at 9.4% factory revenue share . IDC’s findings also showed that both HP and IBM decreased their blade server market share from Q4 2010.
Posted in Cisco on May 20th, 2011
If you’ve been reading this blog over the past six months, you’ll know that I’ve continued to bust on Cisco for not providing market share numbers after selling their UCS product line for two years. I believe the wait is now over.
Posted in Dell on May 9th, 2011
Dell announced today the addition a full-height 4 socket PowerEdge M915 blade server based on the AMD Opteron 6100 series CPU family. Known best with the code name, “Magny-Cours”, this CPU family boasts up to 12 CPU cores with a 512k per core L2 cache and a 12MB of shared L3 cache. The AMD Opeteron [...]
Posted in Dell on May 2nd, 2011
Dell’s Product Marketing team recently provided me with a pair of Dell PowerEdge M710HD blade servers, so I decided to give you a review, but today I’m taking a different approach and providing you with a review via video. Since this blog is YOUR blog, let please let me know if you like this format.