Backing Up the Dell PowerEdge MX7000 Settings and Configurations

As anyone knows, having a functional backup (and recovery) plan for your datacenter is vital to insuring data protection.  While data protection of servers is a basic need, what about the infrastructure that supports it?  In the blade server world, the infrastructure is the chassis, management and switches.  In this post, I’ll discuss best practices for backing up the settings and configurations of the Dell PowerEdge MX7000 infrastructure. Continue reading →

Cisco Announces UCS X210c M7 and UCS X410c M7 Blade Servers

As expected, I’m starting to see the blade server vendors unveil their next generations of product based in the 4th Generation Intel Xeon SP CPUs.  It looks like Cisco was first to announce, as I haven’t seen any other blade server vendor announce.  In today’s blog post, I’ll highlight what’s been released about Cisco’s latest announcements. Continue reading →

2022 – Year in Review

As my final blog post of the year, I always like taking a look into my 2022 metrics.   It’s fun to see what people search for, and where they come from, so here’s what I found. Before I begin, let me say thank you! I appreciate each and every one of you who take the time to read this simple little blog on blade servers. While I’d love to be the next ServeTheHome, I’m happy with continuing to provide blade server news as my little hobby. Continue reading →

Looking for vSAN Ready Nodes that Run vSAN 8 – Your Choices Are Limited

Now that VMware has released vSphere 8.0, I thought it would be interesting to gather up all of the blade servers that are certified as “vSphere Ready Nodes.”  The results were quite shocking. Continue reading →

An Updated Way to Get GPUs on Dell PowerEdge MX7000

It should be no surprise that the popularity of accelerators in the datacenter continues to grow.  In years past, I’ve written a few blog posts on the GPU options for blade servers, but at that time, the options were limited to either small GPUs like the NVIDIA T4 or mezzanine based GPUs.  Now the solutions that are available really open up some great options of using GPUs on blade servers.  Dell Technologies and Liqid have worked together to provide a way to provide multiple GPUs to blade servers using concepts that we won’t see in the market for another few years, so take a few minutes to learn more. Continue reading →

Can You Run GPUs on Blade Servers?

In the past, a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) was equated to a workload that was designing something, like building automobiles.  However, over the past few years, organizations have realized that GPUs have more value than utilization in Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML).  In fact, a large majority of recent GPU adoption revolved around utilization of GPUs with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).   As we look at a “modular infrastructure” (aka blade server) environments, having multiple servers within a small footprint is ideal for VDI.  In today’s blog post, I’m going to review what each blade server vendor offers for GPU options. Continue reading →

Intel Announces End of Optane Memory But There’s More to the Story

I woke up today with a nice blog post from Tom’s Hardware titled, “Intel Kills Optane Memory Business Entirely“.  While this may not e a surprise to some, it sure jolted me.  As I started to look into this, there’s more to this story. Continue reading →