It’s been a while since we’ve seen a Gartner Magic Quadrant for blade servers as they discontinued it in 2014. Last month, Gartner created a new Magic Quadrant to replace the older one. The newest Magic Quadrant incorporates both blade servers and multi-node servers. According to Gartner, “the separation of the blade and multinode server markets has become harder to maintain as multinode servers adopt the technology characteristics of blade servers. With the evolution of new modular server designs, the concept of traditional server blades will fade in favor of increasingly variable ‘bricks’ or ‘cartridges.’ Consequently, a Magic Quadrant that tracked only the blade server market could only deliver partial value. This new Magic Quadrant is designed to better reflect the evolving market for any servers that display modular characteristics.” You can view the full article here, but I’ve summarized their findings for the top modular server vendors below.
Yearly Archives: 2015
Blade Server Comparison – May 2015
Many of the blade vendors made announcements recently featuring the Intel Xeon E7 v3 CPU, so below is an updated chart of current blade servers. Once Intel announces the Xeon E5-4600 v3 I’ll include those as well. Continue reading
A Closer Look at the Dell FD332 for FX Architecture
[updated 4.13.15] Today Dell officially started shipping the FC430 and the FD332 Storage blocks for the Dell FX Architecture. The FC430 is a slick, server offering for many workloads, but many questions pop up around what the FD332 is and how it can be used, so in today’s post I’m hoping to clarify it for you.
Dell PowerEdge FX Technical Guide Now Available
Dell recently released the Technical Guide for the PowerEdge FX Architecture and you can download it below.
Dell VRTX Now Scales Up to 50TB of Shared Storage
A few weeks ago Dell added a 2TB 2.5″ 7.2K RPM Near-Line SAS drive to the list of supported drives. This new addition not only increases the shared storage capacity of the Dell VRTX chassis from 48TB to 50TB but it also offers better performance. Continue reading
Understanding Dell’s integrated Remote Management
Dell’s integrated Remote Access Controller, or iDRAC, is a great tool, but you need to make sure you purchase the version that best meets your needs. In this blog post, I’ll help clarify the pro’s and con’s of each as well as provide you an eval key to help you see what you may be missing.
IDC Worldwide Server Tracker – Q4 2014 Released
IDC released the Q4 2014 Quarterly Server Tracker last night and it revealed that Dell has taken the #2 server spot with 16.7% market share.
Blade Server Comparisons – March 2015
It’s always good to have a single source of comparisons for the Tier 1 blade servers, so here is the updated list. I realize that I should have posted this in December, but I guess it’s better late than never. Continue reading
Dell PowerEdge FX2 Solution Increased Density and Simplified Setup vs HP Solution
A newly released paper from Principled Technologies shows the Dell PowerEdge FX2 took 133 fewer steps to deploy 42 servers vs an HP server solution in 62.8% less time.