Author Archives: Kevin Houston

About Kevin Houston

Founder of BladesMadeSimple.com. Blade server evangelist.

(UPDATED) Prize Fight: IBM MAX5 vs Dell FlexMem Bridge

Updated 5/24/2010 – I’ve received some comments about expandability and I’ve received a correction about the speed of Dell’s memory, so I’ve updated this post.  You’ll find the corrections / additions below in GREEN.

Since I’ve received a lot of comments from my post on the Dell FlexMem Bridge technology, I thought I would  do an unbiased comparison between Dell’s FlexMem Bridge technology (via the PowerEdge 11G M910 blade server) vs IBM’s MAX5 + HX5 blade server offering.  In summary both offerings provide the Intel Xeon 7500 CPU plus the ability to add “extended memory” offering value for virtualization, databases and any other workloads that benefit from large amounts of memory. Continue reading →

Dell FlexMem Bridge Helps Save 50% on Virtualization Licensing

Let’s face it.  Virtualization is everywhere.  

Odds are there is something virtualized in your data center.  If not, it soon will be.  As more workloads become virtualized, chances are you are going to run out of “capacity” on your virtualization host.  When a host’s capacity is exhausted, 99% of the time it is because the host ran out of memory, not CPU.   Continue reading →

More Blade Server Rumours

It’s been a while since I’ve posted what rumours I’m hearing, so I thought I’d dig around and see what I can find out.  NOTE: this is purely speculation, I have no definitive information from any vendor about any of this information so this may be false info.  Read at your own risk. Continue reading →

Another Dell Innovation – Lifecycle Controller

Perhaps one of Dell’s best kept secrets on their 11G servers (blade, rack and tower) is something called Lifecycle Controller. This innovative offering allows a user to configure the hardware, run diagnostics and prep the server for an operating system. “SO WHAT?” you are probably thinking – “HP and IBM have this with their SmartStart and ServerGuide CD’s!” Yes, you are right, however Continue reading →

Running CAD on a Blade? Possible on HP’s WS460c G6 Workstation Blade

What if you could run a graphics intensive application, like CAD from Chicago, and you were sitting in Atlanta?  What if you could work on a multi-million dollar animated movie feature from the luxury of your home?  These and more could be possible with the HP WS460c G6 Workstation Blade.  Continue reading →

Yet Another Win for HP Blades, but Why?

I heard a rumour on Friday that HP has been chosen by another animated movie studio to provide the blade servers to render an upcoming movie. To recount the movies that have used / are using HP blades: Continue reading →

It's A Bird, It's a Plane, it's Superdome 2 – ON A BLADE SERVER

Wow.  HP continues its “blade everything” campaign from 2007 with a new offering today – HP Integrity Superdome 2 on blade servers.  Touting a message of a “Mission-Critical Converged Infrastructure” HP is combining the mission critical Superdome 2 architecture with the successful scalable blade architecture. Continue reading →

Will LIGHT Replace Cables in Blade Servers?

Part of the Technology Behind Lightfleet's Optical Interconnect Technology (courtesy Lightfleet.com)

CNET.com recently reported that for the past 7 years, a company called Lightfleet has been working on a way to replace the cabling and switches used in blade environments with light, and in fact has already delivered a prototype to Microsoft Labs.  Continue reading →

Behind the Scenes at the InfoWorld Blade Shoot-Out

Daniel Bowers, at HP, recently posted some behind the scenes info on what HP used for the InfoWorld Blade Shoot-Out that I posted on a few weeks ago (check it out here) which led to HP’s blade design taking 1st place.  According to Daniel, HP’s final config consisted of:

  • a c7000 enclosure
  • 4 ProLiant BL460c G6 server blades (loaded with VMWare ESX) built with 6-core Xeon processors and 8GB LVDIMMs
  • 2 additional BL460c G6’s with StorageWorks SB40c storage blades for shared storage
  • a Virtual Connect Flex-10 module
  • a 4Gb fibre switch

Jump over to Daniel’s HP blog at to read the full article including how HP almost didn’t compete in the Shoot-Out and how they controlled another c7000 enclosure 3,000 miles away (Hawaii to Houston). 

Daniel’s HP blog is located at http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/eyeonblades/archive/2010/04/13/behind-the-scenes-at-the-infoworld-blade-shoot-out.aspx

IBM Announces New Blade Servers with POWER7 (UPDATED)

UPDATED 4/14/2010 – IBM announced today their newest blade server using the POWER7 processor.  The BladeCenter PS700, PS701 and PS702 servers are IBM’s latest addition to the blade server family, behind last month’s announcement of the BladeCenter HX5 server, based on the Nehalem EX processor.  The POWER7 processor-based PS700, PS701 and PS702 blades support AIX, IBM i, and Linux operating systems.  (For Windows operations systems, stick with the HS22 or the HX5.)  For those of you not familiar with the POWER processor, the POWER7 processor is a 64-bit, 4 core with 256KB L2 cache per core and 4MB L3 cache per core.  Today’s announcement reflects IBM’s new naming schema as well.  Instead of being labled “JS” blades like in the past, the new POWER family blade servers will be titled “PS” – for Power Systems.  Finally – a naming schema that makes sense.  (Will someone explain what IBM’s “LS” blades stand for??)  Included in today’s announcement are the PS700, PS701 and PS702 blade.  Let’s review each.

IBM BladeCenter PS700
The PS700 blade server is a single socket, single wide 4-core 3.0GHz POWER7
processor-based server that has the following:

  • 8 DDR3 memory slots (available memory sizes are 4GB, 1066Mhz or 8GB, 800Mhz)
  • 2 onboard 1Gb Ethernet ports
  • integrated SAS controller supporting RAID levels 0,1 or 10
  • 2 onboard disk drives (SAS or Solid State Drives)
  • one PCIe CIOv expansion card slot
  • one PCIe CFFh expansion card slot

The PS700 is supported in the BladeCenter E, H, HT and S chassis.  (Note, support in the BladeCenter E requires an Advanced Management Module and a minimum of two 2000 watt power supplies.)

IBM BladeCenter PS701
The PS701 blade server is a single socket, single wide 8-core 3.0GHz POWER7
processor-based server that has the following:

  • 16 DDR3 memory slots (available memory sizes are 4GB, 1066Mhz or 8GB, 800Mhz)
  • 2 onboard 1Gb Ethernet ports
  • integrated SAS controller supporting RAID levels 0,1 or 10
  • 2 1 onboard disk drive (SAS or Solid State Drives)
  • one PCIe CIOv expansion card slot
  • one PCIe CFFh expansion card slot

The PS701 is supported in the BladeCenter H, HT and S chassis only. 

IBM BladeCenter PS702
The PS702 blade server is a dual socket, double-wide 16–core (via 2 x 8-core CPUs) 3.0GHz POWER7 processor-based server that has the following:

  • 32 DDR3 memory slots (available memory sizes are 4GB, 1066Mhz or 8GB, 800Mhz)
  • 4 onboard 1Gb Ethernet ports
  • integrated SAS controller supporting RAID levels 0,1 or 10
  • 2 onboard disk drives (SAS or Solid State Drives)
  • 2 PCIe CIOv expansion card slots
  • 2 PCIe CFFh expansion card slots

The PS702 is supported in the BladeCenter H, HT and S chassis only. 

For more technical details on the PS blade servers, please visit IBM’s redbook page at: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/redp4655.html?Open