Author Archives: Kevin Houston

About Kevin Houston

Founder of BladesMadeSimple.com. Blade server evangelist.

(UPDATED) How IBM Can Provide 1,800 Processing Cores on a Single Blade Server

UPDATED 11-16-2010

IBM BladeCenter GPU Expansion Blade with HS22IBM recently announced a new addition to their BladeCenter family – the IBM BladeCenter GPU Expansion blade.  This new offering provides a single HS22 with the capability of hosting up to 4 x NVIDIA Tesla M2070 or Tesla M2070Q GPUs each running 448 processing cores each.  Doing the math, this equals the possibility of having 4,928 processing cores in a single 9u IBM BladeCenter H chassis.  That means you could have 19,712 processing cores PER RACK.  With such astonishing numbers, let’s take a deeper look at the IBM BladeCenter GPU Expansion blade.  

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The Best Blade Server Option Is…[Part 2 – A Look at Dell]

Updated 11/4/2010 at 3:51 p.m. Eastern
-added links to Remote Console sessions on 11G blade servers
 
One of the questions I get the most is, “which blade server option is best for me?” My honest answer is always, “it depends.” The reality is that the best blade infrastructure for YOU is really going to depend on what is important to you. Based on this, I figured it would be a good exercise to do a high level comparison of the blade chassis offerings from Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM. If you ready through my past blog posts, you’ll see that my goal is to be as unbiased as possible when it comes to talking about blade servers. I’m going to attempt to be “vendor neutral” with this post as well, but I welcome your comments, thoughts and criticisms.   In today’s post, I’ll cover Part 2 of the series where I dig into Dell’s offering – so get a cup of java, sit back and enjoy the read. Continue reading →

A Post from the Archive: “Cisco UCS vs IBM BladeCenter H”

It’s always fun to take a look at the past, so today I wanted to revisit my very first blog post.  Titled, “Cisco UCS vs IBM BladeCenter H”, I focused on trying to compare Cisco’s blade technology with IBM’s.  Was I successful or not – it’s up to you to decide.  This article ranks at #7 in all-time hits, so people are definitely interested.  Keep in mind this post has not been updated to reflect any changes in offering or technologies, it’s just being offered as a look back in time for your amusement.  Here’s how the blog post began: Continue reading →

Cisco UCS vs HP Virtual Connect

My friend, M. Sean McGee, wrote up a great blog post in April that deserves revisiting titled, “The State of Statelessness: Cisco UCS vs. HP Virtual Connect“.  In the write-up, he discusses Cisco how Unified Computing System (UCS) blade servers are “stateless” and use “UCS Service Profiles”.  He identifies 96 server settings that can be handled via the UCS Service Profile vs 12 server settings with HP’s Virtual Connect Server Profile.  It is a great read, so I encourage you to take a few minutes and see if you agree with what he writes.

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Brocade FCoE Switch Module for IBM BladeCenter

Brocade Converged 10GbE Switch for IBM BladeCenterIBM recently announced the addition of a Brocade Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) switch module for the IBM BladeCenter designed to deliver up to 24% savings over traditional 10Gb Ethernet & 8Gb FC setup. 

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Blade Server Q&A

I’ve been getting some questions via email and I’ve seen some questions being asked in my LinkedIn group, “Blade Server Technologies” so I thought I’d take a few minutes in today’s post to answer these questions, as well as get your feedback.  Feel free to post your thoughts on these questions in the comments below. Continue reading →

IBM to Acquire BLADE Network Technologies

IBM announced on Sept. 27, 2010 that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire BLADE Network Technologies (BLADE), a privately held company based in Santa Clara, CA. BLADE specializes in software and devices that route data and transactions to and from servers. The acquisition is anticipated to close in the fourth quarter of 2010, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions and applicable regulatory reviews. Financial terms were not disclosed.

To read the full press release, continue reading.

REVISED HP Loses Blade Market Share in Q2

Revised 9/29/2010 – I previously titled this blog post, “HP Loses Blade Server Market Share to IBM…” however I have since re-thought that statement. The report from IDC does not specify where HP’s blade server market share went from Q1 2010 – it only provides Q2 2010 market share numbers. I regret any confusion I may have caused.
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