Tag Archives: blade server

Industry’s First Ever See Through Blade Chassis

Are you one one of those people who feel that blade servers are too complex?  Do you have problems understanding what’s going on inside of a blade chassis?  If you said yes to either of the above questions, then you’ll want to check this blade chassis out.

One of my peers at Dell, Max Abelardo, recently created a sturdy plexiglass mock up of the Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade chassis to help demonstrate the simplicity of Dell’s blade solution.  According to Max, he started pondering the idea with a buddy who is a wood worker and 3.5 weeks later it was done.  Yes, this is a working mockup but probably not ideal for a datacenter.  Don’t go to your nearest Dell Solutions Center looking for one of these, because you won’t find it.  Max only made one and he uses it for his customers.  For more details on how this was made, I encourage you to reach out to Max on Twitter at @mabelard.

Enjoy.

Clear-M1000e_front

Clear M1000e - rear

Clear M1000e - Early Build

Clear M1000e - Early Build (rear)

Clear M1000e - Side

Clear M1000e - CMC

Clear M1000e - midplane

Clear M1000e - midplane2

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.  Kevin works for Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global Enterprise market.

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.

Demonstrating the Quietness of Dell PowerEdge VRTX

After publishing the details of the PowerEdge VRTX this week, several people stated they would like to know how quiet it is.  I could give you the marketing data on how many decibels it runs but instead, I thought I’d put together a short video to show the quietness of PowerEdge VRTX.  The video quality is not the best however I think you’ll get the point of how silent PowerEdge VRTX is.

http://youtu.be/A9L1Y7DeCpc

 

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com. He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace. Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization. Kevin works for Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global Enterprise market.

 

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.

A Detailed Look at Dell PowerEdge VRTX

PowerEdge VRTX - Front View with 2.5 DrivesWhat happens when you merge rack servers with blade servers? You get the newly announced Dell PowerEdge VRTX. Three years in the making, the Dell PowerEdge VRTX (pronounced “ver-tex”) is advertised as a revolutionary, easy-to-manage office-optimized data center that converges servers, storage and networking into a compact package. In the following post, I’ll give you a deep-dive look into the Dell PowerEdge VRTX solution.

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An Introduction to Dell PowerEdge VRTX

An Introduction to Dell PowerEdge VRTX

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.  Kevin works for Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global Enterprise market.

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.

IDC Worldwide Server Tracker for Q1 2013

IDC came out with their Q1 2013 worldwide server market revenue report on May 29, 2013 which shows blade server revenues decreased 2.9% year over year to $1.9 billion while accounting for 17.7% of all server revenues reported.  According to the report, this is the fifth time in the previous six quarters that the server market has experienced a year-over-year decline in worldwide revenue. Server unit shipments decreased 3.9% year over year in 1Q13 to 1.9 million units as consolidation continued to be a strategic focus for many large and small customers around the globe. Continue reading →

Gartner Blade Server Quadrant (April 2013)

Gartner_Magic_Quadrant_April_2013

Gartner released the annual Magic Quadrant for blade servers last month and it shows significant changes across the leaderboard within the top 4 leading blade server vendors. 

The Magic Quadrant is a tool Gartner uses to visually define a given market segment showcasing technology vendors who are leading the market in 4 areas:

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Best Practices for Using the Dell Force10 MXL in Cisco Nexus Environments

One of the best offerings that Dell has within their blade server I/O portfolio is the Dell Force10 10/40 GbE MXL Switch Module.  You can check out the full details on my earlier blog post, but at a high level, this switch provides 32 x 10GbE ports downstream to the blade servers while offering up to 6 x 40GbE ports up stream.  In addition, up to (6) MXL switch IOMs can be stacked using ring or daisy-chain topology giving it a stacking bandwidth upstream of 320G all while providing intra-chassis communication allowing servers to talk to each other without going out to the Access layer.  But, if you have a Cisco network, will this work?  Believe it or not, Dell and Cisco can play nice together.

The engineers at Dell recently released an easy-to-use guide of recommended basic deployment practices for the Dell Force10 MXL in the access layer of a Cisco Nexus network environment.  I have to warn you though – it’s not for the faint at heart, as it includes detailed command line verbage on how to set it up.  If you know what the command ” # feature enable vpc” does within NX-OS, you’ll appreciate this document.  The guide is broken up topically as follows:

  • the and concepts of MXL switch deployment
  •  introduction to the Force10 MXL hardware and its connectivity and management options
  • the first steps of MXL deployment (including a rapid introduction to some common MXL initial deployment tasks)
  • downlink (server-side) configuration options
  • Link Aggregation Group Configuration
  • Uplink configuration options to the Cisco Nexus network environment: running PVST with discreet LAGs nd running PVST with a single LAG connected across two top-of-rack switches that are using a Multi-chassis LAG

Sample Network Topology for Dell Force10 MXL and Cisco Nexus NetworkIf you have a Cisco Nexus network, take a few minutes to see how easy it is to add a Dell Force10 MXL into your environment.    You might just be surprised at what you find.

Download the complete whitepaper titled, “Deploying the Dell Force10 MXL into a Cisco Nexus Network Environment” at http://bit.ly/DellMXLonNexus

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.  Kevin works for Dell as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global 500 market.

 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.

Intel’s Advancements Lead to the Future of the Data Center

A little over a year ago, I wrote an article titled, “Why Blade Servers Will be the Core of Future Data Centers” where I coined the name “Rackplane” which described the concept of future data centers designed with rack sized systems capable of having blade server like compute, memory, I/O, network and storage nodes all communicating at high speeds.  While my vision is pure speculation (and was imagined before my current employment with Dell), Intel and Facebook seem to be creating a vision of the future of data centers that is similar to mine.  Continue reading →

BladesMadeSimple – Year in Review

I’d like to begin 2013 first by saying thank you to you, the reader.  I created BladesMadeSimple.com in October of 2009 with the goal of creating a repository of blade server related material for my own use modeled after Rich Bramley’s virtualization blog, vmetc.com.  About 3 months after creation of the inception, BladesMadeSimple gained industry visibility after I wrote the blog post titled,

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Dell Scores Editor’s Choice Award from InfoWorld

InfoWorld Editors Choice Award LogoInfoWorld.com’s Test Center awarded Dell’s blade server portfolio the “Editor’s Choice” award today.  Senior Contributing Editor, Paul Venezia, says, ” From a purely hardware perspective, the Dell PowerEdge M1000e is quite a compelling system. Continue reading →