In case you haven’t heard, “cloud” discussions are here to stay and everyone has their own recommendations for you to start building your cloud environment, but which is best for you? Intel has created the “Intel® Cloud Builders” program aimed at making it easier for you to build, enhance and operate cloud infrastructure.
Author Archives: Kevin Houston
Another Free Chassis Offering – Is Cisco Driving These Offers?
I was recently on one of those calls from HP “checking in”. If you are an HP customer you may know these calls start off with something like “We know you spent money on HP last quarter so how many people from this company will have to pester you until you buy more stuff from us?” One of the things the HP rep mentioned towards the end the process, however, is that until October HP is now offering a free blade enclosure with the purchase of four HP BL460’s. Continue reading
Best Practices for Power and Cooling Blades
One of the biggest challenges related to blade servers in an existing data center is how to power and cool. APC wrote a white paper (link below) that explains how to asses the options to best power and cool your blade environment.
Will the New VMware vSphere 5 Licensing Affect Blade Vendors?
As you no doubt heard by now, VMware has announced a new version of vSphere along with some new or improved features however, this post will not highlight these features. In this post, I want to talk about what did not improve – the licensing. Continue reading
Blade Chassis I/O Diagrams
Many people get confused as to why so many I/O modules are needed within a given blade chassis. The basic concept is simple (in most cases) – for each port you need on a given blade server, you need to have a corresponding I/O module. For example, if you need 4 NICs, you’re going to need 4 Ethernet modules (in most cases.) In today’s post, I thought I would keep it simple and publish the I/O diagrams of Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM chassis. Of course, I am human and “have been known to make mistakes – from time to time” so please feel free to correct me on any errors you see. Enjoy.
(Updated 8/3/2011 – fixed Dell M1000e Full Height I/O Diagram)
IBM Offers FREE Blade Chassis Through December (No Purchase Required)
IBM once again is promoting is striving to increase market share by offering customers the chance to get a “free” IBM BladeCenter chassis. The last time they promoted a free chassis was in November, so this year they kicked in the promo effective July 5, 2011. The promotion is for a free chassis – without any purchase, however a chassis without any blades or switches is just a metal box. Regardless, this promotion is a great way to help offset some of the cost to implementation of your blade server project. Continue reading
BladesMadeSimple.com is Looking for Help
Are you passionate about technology? Do you stay up to date on what’s new in the x86 marketplace, especially blade servers? Do you like to work for free? If so, BladesMadeSimple.com could use you!
The End of Blade Servers?
Personal Cassette Players. Portable CD players. Dial up Internet. Betamax. The VCR. Pagers. These are all popular technologies that have gone away. When they were hot, you would never have expected for them to one day be extinct. Are blade servers set to follow in the footsteps of these other blade technologies? Continue reading
Rack Servers vs Blade Servers – Which is Best?
Since the dawn of mankind (or more realistically, the early 2000’s) people have debated whether blade servers or rack servers were best for their datacenter environment. It may surprise you that I personally don’t believe that blade servers fit everywhere. In fact, if you aren’t running out of power/cooling, you don’t have space constraints, you need a lot of local I/O expansion or you don’t have management issues with your physical server environment, you may be better off with rack servers. That being said, there are a lot of benefits to a blade server design as well.
Comprehensive List of Blade Server Web Site Links
If you are like me, you are constantly referring to manufacture web sites for product specs, available options, etc. Today, I’ve put together a list of web sites that will help streamline your search. Since links change and new ones get added, I’ve put out a “helpful links” tab at the top of my blog as well for you to reference and bookmark. As I get recommendations from my readers, I’ll update the “helpful links” tab, so be sure to add it to your favorites. Continue reading