Author Archives: Kevin Houston

About Kevin Houston

Founder of BladesMadeSimple.com. Blade server evangelist.

Blade Servers Causing Data Centers To Be Re-designed?

A recent article from AsiaOne.com reported that modern data centers are having problems handling the dense server environment that blade servers provide.  The article mentions that traditional data centers that were built less than five years ago were designed to have a uniform energy distribution of around 2kW to 4kW (kilowatts) per server rack.  With the growth of blade servers being at the highest since the inception eight years ago, today’s data centers are packed with dense blade servers that are now pushing the envelope beyond 12kW, thus putting a huge strain on the design of the data center.  In fact, according to Rakesh Kumar, a Gartner research vice-president, “‘A rack that is 60 per cent filled could have a power draw as high as 12kW.” The article goes on to mention that current data centers may need to be re-designed to handle the future power requirements of blades. Continue reading →

What Is Your Ideal VMware Lab Environment?

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been researching what are the “ideal” configurations for a home VMware vSphere lab.  Ideally, it would be small enough to run a few virtual machines and demonstrate high availability features like vMotion, DRS, HA or even FT.  The problem that I’ve run into is that I haven’t found a really good site that has a detailed list of parts and pieces to buy.  Continue reading →

4 Socket Blade Servers Density: Vendor Comparison (2011)

Revised with corrections  3/1/2011 10:29 a.m. (EST)
Almost a year ago, I wrote an article highlighting the 4 socket blade server offerings.  At that time, the offerings were very slim, but over the past 11 months, that blog post has received the most hits, so I figured it’s time to revise the article.  In today’s post, I’ll review the 4 socket Intel and AMD blade servers that are currently on the market.  Yes, I know I’ll have to revise this again in a few weeks, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.  Continue reading →

Blade Server Market Share Comparison – Q3 2009 vs Q3 2010

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 →

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 →

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 →