Gartner released the annual Magic Quadrant for blade servers last month and it shows significant changes across the leaderboard within the top 4 leading blade server vendors.
The Magic Quadrant is a tool Gartner uses to visually define a given market segment showcasing technology vendors who are leading the market in 4 areas:
If you are new to blade servers, you may find there are quite a few options to consider in regards to managing your Ethernet traffic. Some vendors promote the traditional integrated switching, while others promote extending the fabric to a Top of Rack (ToR) device. Each method has its own benefits, so let me explain what those are. Before I get started, although I work for Dell, this blog post is designed to be an un-biased review of the network options available for many blade server vendors.
IDC released their Q4 server numbers on Wednesday. Here is a quick summary of the findings – for a full summary, read the full report via the link at the bottom.
IDC came out with their Q2 2012 worldwide server market revenue report on August 28, 2012 which shows that a 4.3% drop in server revenues worldwide, marking the third straight quarter of decline. Continue reading
A few days ago I compared the HP ProLiant BL660c blade server with the Dell PowerEdge M820, so today I wanted to point you to some performance data. Brian Basset, a Performance Engineer within Dell’s Solutions Performance Analysis group, recently ran some SPEC benchmarks on both the HP BL660c and the Dell M820 and the results were interesting. In summary: Continue reading
If you are a recurring reader to this blog, you’ll know that I work for Dell (1 year as of August 15) which makes me a bit bias toward Dell. However, with the recent announcements of 4 socket blade servers based on Intel’s E5-4600 processor by HP and Dell, I thought it would be interesting to see how they line up. With the attempt to be unbiased, I’ve listed everything I thought was relative about both servers so that you, the reader, could make your own decision about which server would work best in your environment. I welcome any feedback, thoughts or comments below. The data below is from HP and Dell’s websites and is current as of 8.14.12. Continue reading
IDC came out with their Q1 2012 worldwide server market revenue report on May 30, 2012 which shows that in spite of a decrease in overall server sales worldwide, blade server revenues increased 7.3% year over year.
One of the industry-leading independent technology assessment service firms, Principled Technologies, just updated their site with a ton of white papers covering performance on just about any product or technology. You can check out their website at http://www.principledtechnologies.com/default.htm for the complete list, but I wanted to give you the links to their papers that cover virtualization performance on blade servers.
HP launched the new ProLiant BL460c Gen8 blade but you would have never known about it. With the prelaunch work done it February it seemed like a non event. The bulk of the goodness on the Gen 8 updates are across the ProLiant family so I will try to keep my focus on those that pertain to the BL460c.
I once was a huge fan of HP’s Virtual Connect Flex-10 10Gb Ethernet Modules but with the new enhancements to VMware vSphere 5, I don’t think I would recommend for virtual environments anymore. The ability to divide the two onboard network cards up to 8 NICS was a great feature and still is, if you have to do physical deployments of servers. I do realize that there is the HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric 10Gb/24-port Module but I live in the land of iSCSI and NFS so that is off the table for me.
With vSphere 5.0, VMware improved on its Continue reading