If you haven’t heard, Intel’s coming out with a new CPU architecture this year and it is a bit different than what you are used to. If you haven’t started re-architecting your plans for future blade servers, now is the time to begin. Continue reading
Tag Archives: performance
What You Need To Know About The Intel Cascade Lake Refresh
Intel has added new CPUs to the Cascade Lake family and here are a few things you should know about these new Refresh CPUs before buying your next blade server.
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Why You Should Consider Changing Your Memory Architecture
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the new Intel Xeon SP processor has more cores but it also has more memory channels. This means you should really consider changing the way you architect your blade servers.
Recommended Memory Configurations for Skylake CPUs
The new architecture of the Intel Xeon SP (aka Skylake) CPU includes more memory channels, which is creating some uncertainty on best practices. In today’s post, I’ll show you the best configurations to consider to help drive high memory performance. Continue reading
5 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Dell Blade Servers
Recently I’ve had to do a lot of “why Dell” presentations and it occurred to me there are a few things about Dell blade servers that many people, including Dell customers, may not know about.
Dell vs Cisco – New Tolly Report (updated)
UPDATED – Tolly Enterprises recently published a new Tolly Report comparing Dell PowerEdge FX2 with Cisco UCS showing results favoring Dell. The 17 page document provides background on each of the product architectures and tests them in four test cases. Continue reading
HP Introduces M.2 SSDs for Blade Servers
HP recently announced the industry’s first M.2 SSD for blade servers. If you’re not familiar with M.2 (pronounced M dot 2), it’s a small form factor card and connector supporting applications such as Wi-Fi, WWAN, USB, PCIe & SATA seen mostly in desktop / laptop systems. Adoption of this form factor in Tier 1 vendors is slow coming, which is why this is a big announcement for HP. Since this plugs into the system board, it avoids traversing the SAS mid-plane and allows for connectivity to the system PCIe bus supporting faster speeds (see below for details.) Continue reading
Choosing the Right Memory for Your Blade Server
With the advancement of CPU architecture, identifying the best options for memory within your server has become more challenging. Should you use a single DIMM or does multiple DIMMs make a difference? What about memory speed – does it really matter? Should you buy single rank (SR), dual rank (DR) or quad rank (QR) DIMMs. I’m not going to pretend to be a memory expert, but hopefully I will help answer these questions in today’s post. Continue reading