Making blade servers simple
Posted in Cisco on Apr 10th, 2012
On March 8, Cisco launched the UCS B200 M3 blade server. The half-height blade uses processors from Intel’s newly-announced Xeon E5 family, and competes with the Dell M620, HP BL460c Gen8, and IBM HS23 server blades.
Posted in Cisco on Feb 8th, 2012
According to a recent event posting by Cisco, the 3rd generation of Cisco UCS blade servers will be revealed on March 6, 2012. The server launch event advertises that Cisco will announce the B200 M3 blade server, and C220 M3, and C240 M3 rack servers on March 6th, 2012. These soon-to-be-announced servers are 2 socket servers built [...]
Posted in Cisco on Jan 30th, 2012
Cisco announced on Jan. 26, 2012 a field replacement program for Cisco UCS B440 Blade Servers. Cisco Field Notice FN – 63430 describes the problem as a failure of a MOSFET, or Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor, power transistor on the blade server that can cause the component to overheat and emit a short flash which could lead [...]
Posted in Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, IDC, Market Analysis on May 24th, 2011
May 24, 2011 - IDC came out with their 1Q 2011 worldwide server market revenue report today showing that Cisco has finally entered the market standings with a 3rd place standing at 9.4% factory revenue share . IDC’s findings also showed that both HP and IBM decreased their blade server market share from Q4 2010.
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 [...]
I recently received a comment on my previous post concerning Cisco’s market share (“What’s the Truth About Cisco’s Market Share“) which has me more confused. The comment admits that Cisco has not released any market share data to IDC, but that when you look at the Cisco Q1 2010 Earnings Call and compare it 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 [...]