Author Archives: Kevin Houston

About Kevin Houston

Founder of BladesMadeSimple.com. Blade server evangelist.

One Stop Shop for Blade Server Links

I continuously find myself re-visiting the same links to find additional information regarding blade servers, so I finally came up with a revolution: why not consolidate the links and put them on my site?    Introducing a new addition to my blog – the “Helpful Links” page.  Located at the top of every page, the Helpful Links page is designed to be a single stop shop for the best links related to blade servers.  My goal is to continue to update this page, so if you have links you want to see, or if something is broken, please let me know.  This is YOUR site.  I built this site for you, so in the words of Jerry Maguire, “Help me, help you.”    Thanks for your continued support.

Go to Helpful Links Section »

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New Study Shows Dell M1000e Chassis Most Power Efficient Chassis

A white paper released today by Dell shows that the Dell M1000e blade chassis infrastructure offers significant power savings compared to equivalent HP and IBM blade environments. In fact, the results were audited by an outside source, the Enterprise Management Associates (http://www.enterprisemanagement.com). After the controversy with the Tolly Group report discussing HP vs Cisco, I decided to take the time to investigate these findings a bit deeper. Continue reading →

Cisco Announces 32 DIMM, 2 Socket Nehalem EX UCS B230-M1 Blade Server

 Thanks to fellow blogger, M. Sean McGee (http://www.mseanmcgee.com/) I was alerted to the fact that Cisco announced on today, Sept. 14, their 13th blade server to the UCS family – the Cisco UCS B230 M1. 

This newest addition performs a few tricks that no other vendor has been able to perform. Continue reading →

VMworld 2010: Up Close and Personal with HP and Dell Blades

Last week at VMworld 2010 I had the opportunity to get some great pictures of HP and Dell’s newest blade servers. The HP Proliant BL620 G7, the HP Proliant BL680 G7 and the Dell PowerEdge M610X and M710HD.   These newest blade servers are exciting offerings from HP and Dell so I encourage you to take a few minutes to look.    Continue reading →

(UPDATED) The Best Blade Server Option Is…[Part 1 – A Look at Cisco]

Updated on 9/13/2010 with link to Sean McGee’s I/O Card Blog Post
 
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. Continue reading →

A Plea to VMWorld Attendees

As VMworld 2010 is right around the corner, I wanted to take a few minutes to make a plea to all attendees. 

This year, IF you receive a bag or backpack that you just don’t want, please don’t throw it away, but instead take it home, go to the dollar store and fill  the backpack with pencils, crayons, paper and erasers and donate it to your local school system.  You would be AMAZED to find out the numbers of children who don’t get backpacks and whose familes can not afford the costly school supplies that are required each year.  You will be making some family happy and you’ll get the name “VMware” marketed throughout the schools, getting the next generation of techno geeks ready to learn all about virtualization.

Thanks for the consideration!

(UPDATED) 4TB SAN, 3 ESX Hosts for only $32,000? YES, It’s Real!

(Updated 7/27/2010 – 11 am EST – added info on power and tower options)

 When you think about blade servers, you probably think, “they are too expensive.” When you think about doing a VMware project, you probably think, “my servers are too old” or “I can’t afford new servers.” For $8 per GB, you can have blade servers preloaded with VMware ESXi 4.1 AND 4TB of storage! Want to know how? Keep reading.  Continue reading →

Tech Field Day 2010 – Seattle Begins

Over the next two days, I will have the opportunity to participate in Gestalt IT’s 3rd Field Day.  Over the next few days, I’ll be stepping outside of my “blades only” discussion and I’ll be blogging about this event.  So that you will appreciate the posts, let me give you some background on this event. Continue reading →