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 →

What Blade Servers Are Certified as VMware vSAN Ready Nodes?

In this day and age, 99% of datacenter environments are virtualized, however a fraction of those environments are using virtualized storage, aka “vSAN”.  I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the full 1000+ page list of VMware vSAN Ready Nodes and deduct all non blade server systems.  In this post, I’ll be highlighting only blade server vSAN Ready Nodes. Continue reading →

A Tour of Dell’s Power Calculator (EIPT)

 

Kevin Houston is the founder of BladesMadeSimple.com.  With over 24 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace Kevin has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware virtualization.  He has worked at Dell Technologies since August 2011 and is a Principal Engineer supporting the East Enterprise Region and is also a CTO Ambassador for the Office of the CTO at Dell Technologies.   #IWork4Dell

 

Disclaimer: The views presented in this blog are personal views and may or may not reflect any of the contributors’ employer’s positions. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any employer. No compensation has been provided for any part of this blog.