It occurred to me that I created a reference chart for showing what blade server options are available in the market (“Blade Server Comparison – 2018“) but I’ve never listed the options for blade server chassis. In this post, I’ll provide you with overviews of blade chassis from Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo. One of the things I’m not going to do is try and give Pro’s and Con’s for each chassis. The reason is quite obvious if you have read this blog before, but in a nutshell, I work for Dell EMC, so I’m not going to promote or bash any vendor. My goal is to simplify each vendor’s offerings and give you one place to get an overview of each blade chassis in the market.
Tag Archives: Cisco
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
Blade Server Comparison – September 2018
With the recent release of the Dell EMC PowerEdge MX blade servers, I realized it’s been a year since I’ve updated my blade server comparison chart. Below is an updated chart to help guide you to the best blade server for your project. (REVISED December 2018 – fixed drive count on Dell EMC PowerEdge MX servers. Thanks to Mike Browning for catching it after this many months!)
New Study Compares Networking Capabilities of Blade Server Solutions
An independent testing company, Principled Technologies, recently released a study that compared the networking capabilities of Dell EMC PowerEdge MX, HPE Synergy and Cisco UCS using VMware vMotion. Their findings:
Blade Server Comparison – September 2017
With the recent release of the Intel Xeon SP CPUs, I realized it’s been a year since I’ve updated my blade server comparison chart. Below is an updated chart to help guide you to the best blade server for your project.
Cisco Announces New Blade Servers
Cisco announced the UCS B200 M5 and UCS B480 M5 blade servers each supporting the newly announced Intel Xeon Scalable Processor. Below are the highlights of each model. Continue reading
Integrating Dell Blade Servers into Cisco Nexus Environments
I recently had some discussions with a customer looking to connect a Dell EMC PowerEdge M1000e to a Cisco Nexus and I was quite surprised at the number of resources available to assist in the project. Below you will find links to the documents I found with the hope it will help you out in the near future.
Cisco Blade Servers Enter vSAN Market
Last month, VMware announced a new vSAN Ready Node using the Cisco UCS B-Series blade server. Blade servers aren’t new to vSAN Ready Nodes (see “VMware Virtual SAN Ready Node on a Blade Server“) and Cisco isn’t new to the vSAN business – they’ve had their UCS C-Series rack servers certified since “Ready Nodes” were announced, so why is this announcement interesting? It’s because it is the first vSAN node that only includes 2 drives. Continue reading
Helpful Blade Server Links
Here is a list of blade-related websites that may help you find more information about blade servers. Since vendors tend to move their sites without notice if you find a dead link, please let me know. If you have other sites that you think are worthy to remember, email me at “kevin AT bladesmadesimple.com”.
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Vblocks Will Continue to Use UCS
As the new year kicks off, Dell EMC leadership has made it clear that the partnership with Cisco is as strong as always. Cisco’s UCS is the compute layer of the Dell EMC Vblock so many wondered if there would be a “Dblock” or something similar using the PowerEdge blade server product from the former VCE group and the answer is an astounding “NO!” (In case you missed it, check out Chad Sakac‘s blog post, “Vblock and VxBlock Use Cisco UCS. Got it?“) Continue reading