Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of BladesMadeSimple.com and it’s been a great decade. Let me walk you back through time and give you some insights as to why this blog was created and what it has accomplished.
10 years ago, I was working for a Large Account Reseller (LAR) when I saw one of my co-worker had created a blog. Rich Bramley had created a blog, VirtuMania, where he blogged on virtualization. At the time, blogs were just becoming “a thing” yet Rich’s blog was getting a lot of visibility and he was getting a reputation. He would have podcasts like this one, where he would invite other bloggers to speak on topics around virtualization. Seeing his success, I decided to get my toes wet and start a blog. On what, however, was the big question. At the time, blade servers had just taken off in the main stream, so I decided to focus on writing about blade servers. To be completely transparent, it wasn’t as much to create a blog for others to read but create an external repository that I could refer to when talking with customers. Somewhat of an external SharePoint.
On Sept 23, 2009, I wrote my first blog post titled, “Cisco UCS vs IBM BladeCenter H” where I compared the top selling IBM BladeCenter H vs the newly designed Cisco UCS. It’s quite astonishing that the Cisco UCS architecture is still around 10 years later whereas all of the others have faded away. Anyway, the blog wasn’t that big of a hit. In fact, that blog post was only viewed 26 times. My “success” with this blog came a couple of months later when I unveiled a big secret.
Researching for new blade server topics to blog about, I came across an article out of Australia that had mentioned that the movie Avatar was created on HP blades. Although the article didn’t go into specifics, I put two and two together and wrote an blog post titled, “The Hit Movie, AVATAR Processed on HP Blade Servers.” The next day, I saw the stats on that blog post and it was insane! I went from 26 views on a single post to over 500 and they all were from HP websites. Long story short – I found out later that the HP teams were not allowed to tell customers about their involvement with the movie, but when I blogged it, they started referring customers to it. That event launched my hobby/career of a blogger. So far this year, I’m averaging 4500 visits a month, which isn’t too shabby considering it’s a personal hobby, I don’t get paid and I’m the only one contributing.
I want to say thank you to everyone who has read this blog, commented on this blog or critiqued this blog. I hope to continue to keep it active and alive – as long as there is blade server news to report.
Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com. He has over 20 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace. Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization. Kevin has worked at Dell EMC since August 2011 as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global Enterprise market from 2011 to 2017 and now works as a Principal Engineer and Chief Technical Server Architect supporting the Central Enterprise Region at Dell EMC.
Disclaimer: The views presented in this blog are personal views and may or may not reflect any of the contributors’ employer’s positions. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any employer. No compensation has been provided for any part of this blog.