Author Archives: Kevin Houston

About Kevin Houston

Founder of BladesMadeSimple.com. Blade server evangelist.

Keep Up with HP Announcements at HP Discover

This week HP has its annual event, called HP Discover, in Las Vegas.  Previously this event was focused on hardware only and was called HP Tech Forum, but this year HP combined hardware and software into one uber event, called HP Discover.  If you are familiar with VMware’s VMworld – this event is very similar, only it focuses on HP products.  This is a great marketing event for HP but more importantly, it gives HP customers, partners and press insight into what’s happening with HP.

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Happy Memorial Day

I wanted to take time with today’s post to step outside the world of blade servers and say a few words about Memorial Day.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with Memorial Day, it is a United States federal holiday observed on the last Monday of May created to commemorate U.S. Service Members who died while in the military service.  Over the past few years, Americans have used Memorial Day to not only remember those servicemen who have lost their lives, but also to remember those who are still serving in the U.S. Military. 

Only a few people know, but I went to college at North Georgia College, a senior military school in the mountains of North Georgia.  Before entering school, I signed up to serve in the Army National Guard‘s 48th Brigade 1/108th Armor Unit for six years.  Little did I know that my National Guard unit was going to be one of the first units activated during my Sophomore year of college for the first conflict, Desert Shield (which later became Desert Storm.)  While we were fortune enough not to be deployed overseas, I spent 3 months of my life as a Army soldier, preparing to support our battle overseas.  I became close friends with dozens of guys who went on to commission as officers in the U.S. Armed Forces.

Today, many of my friends from college are serving as high rank officers in the Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force.  They leave their families to spend years fighting for my freedom as an American, knowing that each day could be their last.  So, today I want to take time to thank those United States soldiers who are currently serving in the U.S. Military as well as those thousands of Americans who have given their lives over the years.  Thank you!  You are our heroes.

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Cisco Finally Releases UCS Market Share Numbers

May 24, 2011  – IDC came out with their 1Q 2011 worldwide server market revenue report today showing that Cisco has finally entered the market standings with a 3rd place standing at 9.4% factory revenue share .  IDC’s findings also showed that both HP and IBM decreased their blade server market share from Q4 2010. Continue reading

Dell Adds AMD-Based M915 to Blade Family

Dell announced today the addition a full-height 4 socket PowerEdge M915 blade server based on the AMD Opteron 6100 series CPU family.  Known best with the code name, “Magny-Cours”, this CPU family boasts up to 12 CPU cores with a 512k per core L2 cache and a 12MB of shared L3 cache.  The AMD Opeteron 6100 family also has AMD CoolCore™ technology, AMD PowerNow!™ technology, Enhanced C1 state, AMD CoolSpeed technology.

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A Review of the Dell PowerEdge M710 HD Blade Server

Dell’s Product Marketing team recently provided me with a pair of Dell PowerEdge M710HD blade servers, so I decided to give you a review, but today I’m taking a different approach and providing you with a review via video.  Since this blog is YOUR blog, let please let me know if you like this format.

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A Look at the Dell PowerEdge M610 Blade Server

Dell PowerEdge M610Intel and Dell recently agreed to provide me with a Dell PowerEdge M610 blade server for me to use in my lab, so I thought I’d take advantage of the opportunity and write-up a review.  I’m going to go into further details about the blade server in the following blog post, but here are the high-level quick specs:

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This Day in History: "HP Claims Cisco UCS Will Be Dead in 1 Year"

A year from now the difference will be (Cisco) UCS (Unified Compute System) is dead and we have had phenomenal market share growth in the networking space…And customers are thrilled and partners are making a lot of money.” – Randy Seidl, VP of the Americas, Enterprise Servers Storage and Networking,  HP (April 26, 2010)

 
This was a quote found in CRN’s article a year ago, today,  from Randy Seidl, HP’s senior vice president of the Americas, Enterprise Servers Storage and Networking, who was tasked in leading the charge against Cisco.  Needless to say, it’s a year later, and Cisco UCS is still around but with much question around how much market share they own since they’ve yet to release market data to IDC or Gartner. 

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Dell Announces Blade Refresh and NIC Partitioning (NPAR)

Dell announced today a refresh of the PowerEdge M910 blade server based on the Intel Xeon E7 processor.  The M910 is a full-height blade that can hold 512GB of RAM across 32 DIMMs.   The refreshed M910 blade server will also feature Dell’s FlexMem bridge that enables users to use all 32 DIMM slots with only 2 CPUs.  You can read more about the M910 blade server in an earlier blog post of mine here.

According to the Dell  press release issued today Continue reading