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
Tag Archives: blade server
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,
Dell Scores Editor’s Choice Award from InfoWorld
InfoWorld.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
How VMware’s Announcements Will Impact Blade Servers
As we near the end of VMworld, I thought I would take some time to highlight a couple of announcements that could impact the way people use blade servers with VMware vSphere.
IDC Worldwide Server Tracker for Q2 2012 Shows Blades Continue to Grow
IDC came out with their Q2 2012 worldwide server market revenue report on August 28, 2012 which shows that a 4.3% drop in server revenues worldwide, marking the third straight quarter of decline. Continue reading
Performance Results – HP BL660c vs Dell M820
A few days ago I compared the HP ProLiant BL660c blade server with the Dell PowerEdge M820, so today I wanted to point you to some performance data. Brian Basset, a Performance Engineer within Dell’s Solutions Performance Analysis group, recently ran some SPEC benchmarks on both the HP BL660c and the Dell M820 and the results were interesting. In summary: Continue reading
HP BL660c vs Dell M820 – A Comparison
If you are a recurring reader to this blog, you’ll know that I work for Dell (1 year as of August 15) which makes me a bit bias toward Dell. However, with the recent announcements of 4 socket blade servers based on Intel’s E5-4600 processor by HP and Dell, I thought it would be interesting to see how they line up. With the attempt to be unbiased, I’ve listed everything I thought was relative about both servers so that you, the reader, could make your own decision about which server would work best in your environment. I welcome any feedback, thoughts or comments below. The data below is from HP and Dell’s websites and is current as of 8.14.12. Continue reading
Deploying the Dell EqualLogic PS-M4110 Blade Storage
Today I came across a newly published a video that showcases the Dell EqualLogic PS-M4110 storage blade. If you are not familiar with the EqualLogic PS-M4110 storage blade,
Dell Announces Their First Storage Blade: PS-M4110
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Dell Unveils ARM-based Server Ecosystem
Until today, I’ve not discussed modular hybrid server platforms like Dell’s PowerEdge C platform or HP’s ProLiant SL Servers because I personally do not think they should be classified as a “blade server.” Perhaps I’m old school, but in order to qualify as a blade server, there must be 1) shared infrastructure 2) shared power/cooling, 3) shared I/O and 4) shared infrastructure management. When I look at hybrid platforms like the ones mentioned above, I don’t feel they qualify as a blade server – however the marketplace, seems comfortable claiming these products as blade servers, hence today’s posting. If you agree with me and feel this is not a true blade server, then feel free to move along to another blog article.