As the new year kicks off, Dell EMC leadership has made it clear that the partnership with Cisco is as strong as always. Cisco’s UCS is the compute layer of the Dell EMC Vblock so many wondered if there would be a “Dblock” or something similar using the PowerEdge blade server product from the former VCE group and the answer is an astounding “NO!” (In case you missed it, check out Chad Sakac‘s blog post, “Vblock and VxBlock Use Cisco UCS. Got it?“) Continue reading
Category Archives: Cisco
Workload Acceleration Options for Blade Servers
I recently was asked what the demand for NVMe drives was, so I pinged my peers to see where they are seeing the adoption of NVMe (in rack or blade servers forms) and got a pretty interesting response. This got me wondering what the options were for NVMe, as well as other acceleration technologies, in the blade server world. Here is what I found.
GPUs and Blade Servers – A Good Idea?
UPDATED 9.23.2016 When looking at the blade server market, the options for GPUs are very limited – in fact only a couple of vendors offer them (more on this later.) So you have to question, is it a good idea to put a GPU in a blade server? Let’s review and find out. Continue reading
Blade Server Comparison – June 2016
With the recent release of the Intel Xeon E5 v4 CPUs, I realized it’s been a year since I’ve updated my blade server comparison chart. Below is an updated chart to help guide you to the best blade server for your project. Continue reading
New Study Shows Dell Blades Outperform Cisco UCS
A newly published study by Principled Technologies reports in tests that the Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade environment delivered up to 91.7% greater throughput while running a virtualized OLTP database workload compared to a similarly priced Cisco UCS 5108 blade environment. In addition they found that the Dell environment delivered consistent scaling as blade servers were added versus the performance degradation observed in the Cisco environment.
Dell vs Cisco – New Tolly Report (updated)
UPDATED – Tolly Enterprises recently published a new Tolly Report comparing Dell PowerEdge FX2 with Cisco UCS showing results favoring Dell. The 17 page document provides background on each of the product architectures and tests them in four test cases. Continue reading
IDC Worldwide Server Tracker Shows 5.1% Growth in Q3 2015
IDC published their Q3 2015 findings last week, and the results were overall positive. In year over year revenues, the worldwide server market saw revenues increase of 5.1%, or $13.4 billion, the sixth consecutive quarter of growth while shipments grew 4.5%, or 2.49 million units. Specific to blade servers, IDC reported Dell’s blade server revenue grew faster than that of any of the top 5 vendors at 34.8%, however Cisco remained at the #2 blade server market share holder behind HP. Continue reading
Favorite Blade Server Website Links
With the split of HP and HPE, here is a list of updated blade-related websites that may help you find more information about blade servers. Since vendors tend to move their sites without notice if you find a dead link, please let me know. Continue reading
IDC Reports Rising Blade Market Share in 2Q15
IDC released their Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker yesterday and reported an overall 6.1% year over year (YoY) growth in servers. IDC had very little mentions about blade server market but reported the following: Continue reading
Websites You Need to Bookmark
One of my ongoing goals with this blog is to be a site for all things blade servers however it can be challenging for me to provide all of the information you may need. Because of this, I created a page dedicated to providing you with a list of helpful websites that you will want to bookmark. Continue reading