Making blade servers simple
Posted in Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Server Comparisons on Feb 28th, 2011
Revised with corrections 3/1/2011 10:29 a.m. (EST) Almost a year ago, I wrote an article highlighting the 4 socket blade server offerings. At that time, the offerings were very slim, but over the past 11 months, that blog post has received the most hits, so I figured it’s time to revise the article. In today’s [...]
I was updating a slide deck that I use to compare blade server technologies for customers when I came across the IDC and Gartner data from Q3 of 2009. I was very surprised at what I found out, so today’s post takes a look back at 2009 and compares it to 2010.
Posted in Dell on Jan 26th, 2011
Updated 1/27/2011 Dell quietly announced the addition of a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) switch module, known as the M8428-k. This blade module advertises 600 ns low-latency, wire-speed, 10GbE performance, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) switching, and low-latency 8 Gb Fibre Channel (FC) switching and connectivity.
Posted in Cisco, Dell, Gartner, HP, IBM, Market Analysis on Jan 21st, 2011
Technology analyst, Gartner, released their Magic Quadrant focused specifically on blade servers this week and the results were not very surprising.
A reader recently commented on my article about HP’s new 32GB DIMM, “At $8039 per DIMM, HP can support 384GB in a BL460c at the cost of $96,000 per server just for the memory! If you filled just one rack with these servers, you would spend $6 million just for the memory. And the memory [...]
Posted in Cisco on Jan 13th, 2011
A recent article by SearchDataCenter.com titled Top Ten Data Center Trends of 2011, predicts that Cisco UCS blade servers will grab mega market share and inspires more converged infrastructure products.
Posted in Cisco on Jan 3rd, 2011
As I’m sure most of you already know, Cisco has released an anticipated update to the firmware for UCS. Of the dozens of enhancements that were added or modified, perhaps one of the most interesting is Cisco’s integration of their rack-based “C-Series” line into the UCS Platform. This provides users with a single interface to [...]
It’s always fun to take a look at the past, so today I wanted to revisit my very first blog post. Titled, “Cisco UCS vs IBM BladeCenter H”, I focused on trying to compare Cisco’s blade technology with IBM’s. Was I successful or not – it’s up to you to decide. This article ranks at [...]
My friend, M. Sean McGee, wrote up a great blog post in April that deserves revisiting titled, “The State of Statelessness: Cisco UCS vs. HP Virtual Connect“. In the write-up, he discusses Cisco how Unified Computing System (UCS) blade servers are “stateless” and use “UCS Service Profiles”. He identifies 96 server settings that can be [...]
Posted in Cisco on Oct 19th, 2010
What is Cisco’s blade server market share? That seems to be the mystery question that no one can really answer. The previous IDC quarterly worldwide server report mentioned nothing about Cisco, yet readers and bloggers alike claim Cisco is #3, so what IS the true answer?