Last week, Dell EMC announced extended life for the PowerEdge VRTX. The announcement stated that Dell EMC would be offering VRTX through the end of 2022. The PowerEdge VRTX is considered a “datacenter in a box” with up to 4 blade servers and 25 hot-pluggable shared drives inside of a tower or 5U system. Continue reading
Tag Archives: blade servers
2019 – Year in Review
As we wrap up this decade, I wanted to take the time to say thank you. While I created this blog to help me create a repository of blade server information, this blog has grown to provide (hopefully) valuable information to you. In reality, without you I wouldn’t have a reason to continue writing on this blog– so thank you! As you may know, this blog is my personal hobby. I do not seek nor receive outside funds to help with the costs, I do it for enjoyment. My biggest challenge continues to coming up with content that is not specific to one vendor. As we move into the new year, I hope you will reach out to me if you come up with ideas of blade server topics you’d like to see. Enough of this – let’s take a look at what was hot in 2019.
Dell EMC Launches Something New, But Don’t Refer to It as AI
Earlier this month Dell EMC unveiled their newest solution of products that combines all of their core products into one system known as PowerOne. This new system will be fully-engineered and highly-automated with autonomous operations and flexible consumption options and is being positioned as “Autonomous Infrastructure” – but don’t call it AI. If you haven’t heard of Autonomous Infrastructure before, it’s because it’s a new category for products that are beyond Converged Infrastructure. The Dell EMC PowerOne combines PowerEdge MX blade servers with PowerMax storage and connects it via Dell EMC Networking while protecting it with Dell EMC Data Protection. I’ll go more into the components at the end of this post, but first I want to focus on what makes PowerOne unique – the automation. Continue reading
BladesMadeSimple Turns 10
Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of BladesMadeSimple.com and it’s been a great decade. Let me walk you back through time and give you some insights as to why this blog was created and what it has accomplished. Continue reading
Overview of the Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect
Earlier this year Cisco announced and has begun shipping the Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect (FI). The Cisco UCS 6454 offers line-rate, low-latency, lossless 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Fibre Channel functions. In this blog post I provide an overview of what you can expect in this fourth generation FI and provide some things you need to be aware of before migrating. Continue reading
Top 5 Reasons Why You Need Intel’s 2nd Generation Xeon SP Processor
A few weeks ago, Intel launched their 2nd generation of Intel Xeon SP (formerly known as “Cascade Lake”.) There are some very important reasons you need to purchase your next blade servers with this CPU. Continue reading
UCS vs PowerEdge MX – Comparison of Admin Tasks
Principled Technologies released a report earlier this month that compared certain administrative tasks between a Cisco UCS blade server solution and a Dell EMC PowerEdge MX solution and the results were quite surprising. Continue reading
2018 – Year in Review
This year, I’d like to do something I haven’t done since 2016. I like to take a minute to review what was successful on my blog and share it with my readers.
What Workloads Are Running on Your Blade Servers?
Higher CPU core counts and faster memory speeds are expanding the use case for blade servers. In years past, a majority of users would say they use blade servers for a dense platform for virtualization. Today, I think there are more workloads than virtualization running on blade servers, but I need your help to decide if my speculation is true. Continue reading
Managing Server Hardware and VMs – You Need This Tool
If your organization has teams that are responsible for managing both the physical server hardware (rack or blade server) lifecycle and the virtual environment, there is a tool that is ideal for you. Continue reading