Earlier this year Cisco announced and has begun shipping the Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect (FI). The Cisco UCS 6454 offers line-rate, low-latency, lossless 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Fibre Channel functions. In this blog post I provide an overview of what you can expect in this fourth generation FI and provide some things you need to be aware of before migrating. Continue reading
Author Archives: Kevin Houston
Top 5 Reasons Why You Need Intel’s 2nd Generation Xeon SP Processor
A few weeks ago, Intel launched their 2nd generation of Intel Xeon SP (formerly known as “Cascade Lake”.) There are some very important reasons you need to purchase your next blade servers with this CPU. Continue reading
Why Blade Servers Could Be the Data Center of the Future
One of my tasks as Chief Technology Architect at Dell is to talk with customers about future technologies. When I reflect on my past vision of where the blade server is heading (“The Blade Server of the Future“) I’m surprised at how close we are to that vision becoming a reality. Based upon where we are heading, the blade server format could be the perfect model for the future datacenter, so let me explain why. Continue reading
Overview of the Industry Top Blade Chassis
It occurred to me that I created a reference chart for showing what blade server options are available in the market (“Blade Server Comparison – 2018“) but I’ve never listed the options for blade server chassis. In this post, I’ll provide you with overviews of blade chassis from Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo. One of the things I’m not going to do is try and give Pro’s and Con’s for each chassis. The reason is quite obvious if you have read this blog before, but in a nutshell, I work for Dell EMC, so I’m not going to promote or bash any vendor. My goal is to simplify each vendor’s offerings and give you one place to get an overview of each blade chassis in the market.
What You May Not Know About PowerEdge VRTX
We just learned this week that the PowerEdge VRTX, which was announced in June of 2013, will remain in the Dell EMC portfolio into 2021. This is great news for customers who have invested into the “datacenter in a box” platform and opens up an opportunity for those who aren’t using it. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the PowerEdge VRTX platform, so here are a few things you may not know. Continue reading
Behind the Scenes of the PowerEdge MX Plexiglass Chassis
If you’ve been to a trade show in the past year, you likely saw the Dell EMC PowerEdge MX blade chassis with a see-through, plexiglass design. One of the designers, Max Abelardo, recently published a video showing how they made the plexiglass chassis, and it’s quite impressive.
UCS vs PowerEdge MX – Comparison of Admin Tasks
Principled Technologies released a report earlier this month that compared certain administrative tasks between a Cisco UCS blade server solution and a Dell EMC PowerEdge MX solution and the results were quite surprising. Continue reading
2018 – Year in Review
This year, I’d like to do something I haven’t done since 2016. I like to take a minute to review what was successful on my blog and share it with my readers.
What Workloads Are Running on Your Blade Servers?
Higher CPU core counts and faster memory speeds are expanding the use case for blade servers. In years past, a majority of users would say they use blade servers for a dense platform for virtualization. Today, I think there are more workloads than virtualization running on blade servers, but I need your help to decide if my speculation is true. Continue reading
Managing Server Hardware and VMs – You Need This Tool
If your organization has teams that are responsible for managing both the physical server hardware (rack or blade server) lifecycle and the virtual environment, there is a tool that is ideal for you. Continue reading