I was updating a slide deck that I use to compare blade server technologies for customers when I came across the IDC and Gartner data from Q3 of 2009. I was very surprised at what I found out, so today’s post takes a look back at 2009 and compares it to 2010. Continue reading
Author Archives: Kevin Houston
What Cisco Has to Do to Win the Blade Server Market
Over the past several months, there has been a lot of discussions about how 2011 is the year Cisco will become a leader in the blade server space. There’s no doubt that there are a lot of customers who have moved to UCS, but in reality there are a few other things that Cisco will need to do to win the top spot. Today I’m going to discuss a few of these things. Continue reading
5 Things Blade Server Manufacturers Won't Tell You
Over the past several years, I’ve run across some things that the blade manufacturer’s won’t easily tell you. Today, I reveal some of those secrets. Continue reading
Dell Adds Multi Blade Chassis Management, But Wait – There's More
Dell recently notified me the latest version – ver 3.1 – of the Dell Chassis Management Controller (CMC) added multi-chassis management capability. In other words, you can have one IP address to manage multiple chassis. Now you may ask, so what? Other vendors have had this feature already, so what’s the big deal. Here’s what’s big about this announcement: Continue reading
Dell Announces Converged 10GbE Switch for M1000e
Updated 1/27/2011
Dell quietly announced the addition of a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) switch module, known as the M8428-k. This blade module advertises 600 ns low-latency, wire-speed, 10GbE performance, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) switching, and low-latency 8 Gb Fibre Channel (FC) switching and connectivity. Continue reading
Gartner Releases Magic Quadrant for Blade Servers
Technology analyst, Gartner, released their Magic Quadrant focused specifically on blade servers this week and the results were not very surprising. Continue reading
Speculating Q4 2010 Blade Server Market Share Results
As I’m anxiously awaiting the Q4 2010 IDC blade server market share results from IDC (due out around the week of Feb 28, 2011), I figured I’d take a risk and see if I can trend what the results may be. Here’s what I found. Continue reading
2011 – The Year of the Intel CPU
It’s no surprise that Intel will be release a few new lines of CPUs this year, but in today’s post I thought I’d take a few minutes to highlight some of the details. Continue reading
HP’s New 32GB DIMMs Too Expensive?
A reader recently commented on my article about HP’s new 32GB DIMM, “At $8039 per DIMM, HP can support 384GB in a BL460c at the cost of $96,000 per server just for the memory! If you filled just one rack with these servers, you would spend $6 million just for the memory. And the memory would run at a paltry 800MHz. Continue reading
Cisco UCS Considered One of Top 10 Data Center Trends for 2011
A recent article by SearchDataCenter.com titled Top Ten Data Center Trends of 2011, predicts that Cisco UCS blade servers will grab mega market share and inspires more converged infrastructure products. Continue reading