With today’s announcement of the Intel E5-2600 v3, Cisco announced the UCS B200 M4 Blade Server. Here’s a quick overview of it.
HP Announces the BladeSystem BL460c Gen 9
Today HP announced their next 2 socket blade server based on the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 CPU, the BL460c Gen 9. Here’s a quick summary of it.
Intel Announces the Xeon E5-2600 v3 CPU
Today Intel announced the next generation of their x86 CPU, the Xeon E5-2600 v3. The specific CPU models being offered vary by server vendor, so here’s a summary of what the new CPU will provide.
A First Look at the Dell PowerEdge M630
The PowerEdge M630, Dell’s newest blade server based on the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 was announced today. Although specifics haven’t been officially posted on Dell’s website, a video releasing some highlights of the newest member to the PowerEdge family was found on YouTube by Gartner Analyst, @Daniel_Bowers, so here is a quick look at it.
A Look at the Cisco UCS M-Series
On September 4th, Cisco released a new line of modular servers under the UCS family known at the M-Series. Interesting enough, though, Cisco’s not calling the new servers “blade servers” but instead they are taking a play out of HP’s Moonshot playbook and calling them “cartridges.” The M-Series won’t be available until Q4 of this year, but in this blog post, I’ll highlight the information Cisco has provided. Continue reading
IDC Worldwide Server Tracker – Q2 2014 Released
The Q2 2014 IDC Worldwide Server Tracker was released on August 26, 2014 and it reported that the demand for x86 servers improved in 2Q14 with revenues increasing 7.8% year over year in the quarter to $9.8 billion worldwide as unit shipments increased 1.5% to 2.2 million servers. HP led the market with 29.6% revenue share based on 7.4% revenue growth over 2Q13. Dell retained second place, securing 21.2% revenue share.
Why Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX is Ideal for Virtualization
I recently had a customer looking for 32 Ethernet ports on a 4 server system to drive a virtualization platform. At 8 x 1GbE per compute node, this was a typical VMware virtualization platform (they had not moved to 10GbE yet) but it’s not an easy task to perform on blade servers – however the Dell PowerEdge VRTX is an ideal platform, especially for remote locations. Continue reading
7 Lessons Learned From Cisco UCS
Here’s a summary of the lessons learned with Cisco UCS from the Cisco LIVE 2014 session titled, “BRKCOM-3010 – UCS: 4+ Years of Lessons Learned by the TAC”.
How Many NICs Do You Use for Virtualization?
Quick poll to see what your typical NIC design is for your virtual environment deployed on blade servers. Please take a minute to answer.
Cisco Announces New UCS Fabric Interconnect
This month Cisco announced a new addition to the UCS family – a mini Fabric Interconnect, called the UCS 6324 Fabric Interconnect, which unlike the ones before it plugs directly into the UCS 5108 chassis. With connectivity for up to 15 servers (8 blade servers and up to 7 direct-connect rack servers), the 6324 is geared toward small environments.