The PowerEdge M630, Dell’s newest blade server based on the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 was announced today. Although specifics haven’t been officially posted on Dell’s website, a video releasing some highlights of the newest member to the PowerEdge family was found on YouTube by Gartner Analyst, @Daniel_Bowers, so here is a quick look at it.
Yearly Archives: 2014
A Look at the Cisco UCS M-Series
On September 4th, Cisco released a new line of modular servers under the UCS family known at the M-Series. Interesting enough, though, Cisco’s not calling the new servers “blade servers” but instead they are taking a play out of HP’s Moonshot playbook and calling them “cartridges.” The M-Series won’t be available until Q4 of this year, but in this blog post, I’ll highlight the information Cisco has provided. Continue reading
IDC Worldwide Server Tracker – Q2 2014 Released
The Q2 2014 IDC Worldwide Server Tracker was released on August 26, 2014 and it reported that the demand for x86 servers improved in 2Q14 with revenues increasing 7.8% year over year in the quarter to $9.8 billion worldwide as unit shipments increased 1.5% to 2.2 million servers. HP led the market with 29.6% revenue share based on 7.4% revenue growth over 2Q13. Dell retained second place, securing 21.2% revenue share.
Why Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX is Ideal for Virtualization
I recently had a customer looking for 32 Ethernet ports on a 4 server system to drive a virtualization platform. At 8 x 1GbE per compute node, this was a typical VMware virtualization platform (they had not moved to 10GbE yet) but it’s not an easy task to perform on blade servers – however the Dell PowerEdge VRTX is an ideal platform, especially for remote locations. Continue reading
7 Lessons Learned From Cisco UCS
Here’s a summary of the lessons learned with Cisco UCS from the Cisco LIVE 2014 session titled, “BRKCOM-3010 – UCS: 4+ Years of Lessons Learned by the TAC”.
How Many NICs Do You Use for Virtualization?
Quick poll to see what your typical NIC design is for your virtual environment deployed on blade servers. Please take a minute to answer.
Cisco Announces New UCS Fabric Interconnect
This month Cisco announced a new addition to the UCS family – a mini Fabric Interconnect, called the UCS 6324 Fabric Interconnect, which unlike the ones before it plugs directly into the UCS 5108 chassis. With connectivity for up to 15 servers (8 blade servers and up to 7 direct-connect rack servers), the 6324 is geared toward small environments.
The Secret to How Cisco Took the #1 Blade Server Spot
IDC and Cisco confirmed this week that Cisco has taken the #1 x86 blade server spot in North America for Q1 in 2014 with 40% revenue market share according to a recent CRN report. This is quite an accomplishment especially since Cisco has only been reporting their numbers for 3 years. So you might wonder – what is the secret to Cisco’s success? I have a few ideas (right or wrong) that might shed some light on why Cisco is having success in their blade server business.
IDC Reports Increased Blade Server Growth in Q1 2014
The quarterly IDC Worldwide Server Tracker was released on May 28, 2014 and it reported that in spite of a decrease in overall server sales, blade servers continue to increase with HP leading the way. To save you the task of reading all of the irrelevant server data, here’s a summary of their blade server findings:
Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX Gets An Upgrade
The past few months have seen some long awaited new additions to Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX system. In an effort to prevent this from being an “all Dell” blog, I’ve held off writing about these new additions until today. In a quick summary, the new additions include: 2nd PERC, added support for VMware ESXi 5.5, added support for the M820 blade server and the ability to repurpose blade servers from the M1000e. Let’s dig into each of these.