Today Intel lifted the embargo and announced the details of “Ice Lake” – the 3rd generation of Xeon SP CPUs. This new architecture brings new advantages that will enhance blade server performance. In this blog post I’ll highlight the specifics of what Ice Lake brings compared to the current generation. Continue reading
Category Archives: Performance
A New CPU is Coming – Better Be Prepared
If you haven’t heard, Intel’s coming out with a new CPU architecture this year and it is a bit different than what you are used to. If you haven’t started re-architecting your plans for future blade servers, now is the time to begin. Continue reading
Why You Should Consider Changing Your Memory Architecture
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the new Intel Xeon SP processor has more cores but it also has more memory channels. This means you should really consider changing the way you architect your blade servers.
Are Blade Servers Dead, or the Future of the DataCenter?
As I talk with customers, I often run into camps who either love blade servers or they absolutely hate them – and will never use them. I even hear some people think blade servers are dying off, but I think that is far from the case. In fact, I believe that blade servers could be the future of the datacenter and here’s why. Continue reading
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.
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
Choosing the Right Memory for Your Blade Server
With the advancement of CPU architecture, identifying the best options for memory within your server has become more challenging. Should you use a single DIMM or does multiple DIMMs make a difference? What about memory speed – does it really matter? Should you buy single rank (SR), dual rank (DR) or quad rank (QR) DIMMs. I’m not going to pretend to be a memory expert, but hopefully I will help answer these questions in today’s post. Continue reading
5 Reasons You May NOT Want Blade Servers
Contrary to popular belief and growing market share, blade servers are NOT for everyone. You may be surprised to hear that from a site that focuses only on blade servers, but the reality is, there are a few situations that don’t warrant blade servers. Here’s the top 5 reasons you may not want blade servers.
Can Blade Servers Make the Disney-Lucasfilm Merger Successful?
In an early Halloween treat, Disney announced on Tuesday the intent to buy Lucasfilm for $4 billion dollars. Even more surprising, was the unveiling that a long-awaited, but never expected sequel to the Star Wars saga, Episode VII, is in “early stage development” to be released by 2015. While many fans are excited to see new life breathed into the Star Wars franchise, early doubters fear that Disney will do more harm than good. Regardless of opinions, there is no doubt in my mind that blade server technology will be an important part of the success of this new merger.
Test Report: Power Efficiency Comparison of Dell and Cisco High Memory Capacity Blade Servers
Dell recently published a new whitepaper that compares the performance and power efficiency of four of the Dell PowerEdge M710HD and M620 blades vs. four of the Cisco B250 M2 blade servers. Here is a summary of the key findings: