The future points toward higher wattage CPUs. Does this point to an end for blade servers? In this blog post, I’ll examine some real world power examples that may give us a clue. Continue reading
Category Archives: Power
Why You May Not Want to Buy a Blade Server
UPDATED 3.25.16 In case you are new here, I’m a big fan of blade servers, however there is one situation where you’ll probably want to avoid them.
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.
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:
Best Practices for Power and Cooling Blades
One of the biggest challenges related to blade servers in an existing data center is how to power and cool. APC wrote a white paper (link below) that explains how to asses the options to best power and cool your blade environment.
Blade Servers Causing Data Centers To Be Re-designed?
A recent article from AsiaOne.com reported that modern data centers are having problems handling the dense server environment that blade servers provide. The article mentions that traditional data centers that were built less than five years ago were designed to have a uniform energy distribution of around 2kW to 4kW (kilowatts) per server rack. With the growth of blade servers being at the highest since the inception eight years ago, today’s data centers are packed with dense blade servers that are now pushing the envelope beyond 12kW, thus putting a huge strain on the design of the data center. In fact, according to Rakesh Kumar, a Gartner research vice-president, “‘A rack that is 60 per cent filled could have a power draw as high as 12kW.” The article goes on to mention that current data centers may need to be re-designed to handle the future power requirements of blades. Continue reading