Author Archives: Kevin Houston

About Kevin Houston

Founder of BladesMadeSimple.com. Blade server evangelist.

Worldwide Server Market Revenues Increase 4.8% in Third Quarter

FRAMINGHAM, Mass., December 3, 2014 – According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, vendor revenue in the worldwide server market increased 4.8% year over year to $12.7 billion in the third quarter of 2014 (3Q14).

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A First Look at Dell’s FX Architecture

Today Dell announced a new server architecture that combines characteristics of both rack servers and blade servers into a new architecture, known as PowerEdge FX.  Today I’ll give you a first look into the platform.  First off – according to Dell’s Product Development team, this platform was not designed to replace Dell’s blade server portfolio.  Instead it was created to help bridge the gap between blade servers and rack servers.  As you look at this new infrastructure, you may ask is it really a “blade server?”  I’ve always claimed if it shared power, cooling and networking, it’s a “blade server” however I’ll let you form your own opinion. 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

A First Look at the Dell PowerEdge M630

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.

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