Tag Archive

AVATAR BL460 BladeCenter Bladecenter H blade server blade servers bladesystem Cisco Cisco UCS cna converged network adapter Dell Emulex FCoE FlexMem Bridge HP HP BladeSystem HP BladeSystem c7000 HS22 HX5 IBM IBM BladeCenter IBM BladeCenter H IDC Intel Intel Xeon 5500 M710HD market share max5 NDC Nehalem EX Network Daughter Card Nexus Nexus 4000 Nexus 4001I NPAR Power PowerEdge M910 UCS UCS 5108 Virtual Fabric Adapter virtualization VMware Xeon 5600 Xeon 7500

Another Free Chassis Offering – Is Cisco Driving These Offers?

Published on August 1, 2011 By Chris Fricke

I was recently on one of those calls from HP “checking in”. If you are an HP customer you may know these calls start off with something like “We know you spent money on HP last quarter so how many people from this company will have to pester you until you buy more stuff from us?” One of the [...]

Best Practices for Power and Cooling Blades

Published on July 25, 2011 By Kevin Houston

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. 

Will the New VMware vSphere 5 Licensing Affect Blade Vendors?

Published on July 20, 2011 By Thales Osterne

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. 

Blade Chassis I/O Diagrams

Published on July 15, 2011 By Kevin Houston

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 [...]

IBM Offers FREE Blade Chassis Through December (No Purchase Required)

Published on July 13, 2011 By Kevin Houston

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 [...]

BladesMadeSimple.com is Looking for Help

Published on July 7, 2011 By Kevin Houston

Are you passionate about technology?  Do you stay up to date on what’s new in the x86 marketplace, especially blade servers?  Do you like to work for free?  If so, BladesMadeSimple.com could use you!

The End of Blade Servers?

Published on June 30, 2011 By Kevin Houston

Personal Cassette Players.  Portable CD players.  Dial up Internet. Betamax.  The VCR.  Pagers.  These are all popular technologies that have gone away.  When they were hot, you would never have expected for them to one day be extinct.  Are blade servers set to follow in the footsteps of these other blade technologies?

Rack Servers vs Blade Servers–Which is Best?

Published on June 22, 2011 By Kevin Houston

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 [...]

Comprehensive List of Blade Server Web Site Links

Published on June 20, 2011 By Kevin Houston

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 [...]

Keep Up with HP Announcements at HP Discover

Published on June 5, 2011 By Kevin Houston

This week HP has its annual event, called HP Discover, in Las Vegas.  Previously this event was focused on hardware only and was called HP Tech Forum, but this year HP combined hardware and software into one uber event, called HP Discover.  If you are familiar with VMware’s VMworld – this event is very similar, [...]