The Intel Xeon E7 v2 CPU was officially announced today advertising 2x the performance, 3x the memory and 4x the I/O bandwidth compared to previous generations. For more information on what the E7 v2 CPU offers, as well as what blade servers were announced, continue reading below.
Is This The End of IBM Blade Servers?
Today news of IBM’s proposed selling of the “low-end” x86 business to Lenovo was announced, so does this mean the end of Big Blue blade servers?
Is Microsoft Planning On Releasing a Blade Server?
A recent patent search shows an application by Microsoft on December 19, 2013 for a “Tray and Chassis Blade Server” hinting that Microsoft may be ready to get into the server hardware market.
Blade Servers Preferred Over Rack Servers (Based on Q3 2013 Report by TBR)
In October, Technology Business Research (TBR) released a report titled, “Corporate IT Buying Behavior & Customer Satisfaction Study x86-based Servers” in which they discussed several topics around customer satisfaction such as Sales and Setup, Server Hardware and Service and Support. Although the report (linked below) is 109 pages, below are a couple of key topics which I found interesting.
IDC Reports Worldwide Server Market Revenues Declines -3.7% Q3 2013
IDC came out with their Q3 2013 worldwide server market revenue report on December 4, 2013 which shows blade server revenues grew 7.7% $2.3 billion. This was a huge turnaround from the -6.2% loss as reported last quarter. Blade server sales accounting for 18.7% of all server revenues reported, nearly 2% higher than last quarter. According to IDC, demand for x86 servers continued to improve in 3Q13, with revenues growing 2.8% in the quarter to $9.5 billion worldwide with unit shipment growth flat at 2.2 million servers. Continue reading
Comparison of x86 Blade Servers
(UPDATED 11.5.2013) I often find myself seeking basic information for competitive blade servers, so I decided to sit down and put together a basic list of blade server details for Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM blade servers. The details provided are based on information publicly available and may be subject to errors. Continue reading
BladesMadeSimple Turns 4
It’s hard to believe this site has turned 4 years old already. It seems like just yesterday I was putting this site together with the intent to keep a log of blade server related information that I could easily reference when talking with customers. 
Max Ethernet Connections on 2 Socket Blade Servers
As 10GbE storage connectivity becomes more popular, the number of 10GbE connections you can get on a blade server becomes a consideration. In this blog post, I’ll review the offerings each blade vendor has to help you easily decide which works best for your project.
Intel E5 2600 v2 vSphere Compatibility
One of the first questions I’ve received when I started discussing the new Intel E5 2600 v2 CPU is “will it work with my existing blade server VMware clusters?” The sales answer is YES, of course. The real answer is, it depends.
Intel Unveils 12 Core Xeon CPU
Today at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel officially announced the next version of the Xeon Family – the E5 2600 v2, aka “Ivy Bridge”.