Tag Archives: blade servers

New iDRAC License Adds New Features Like Telemetry Streaming To Your Blade Servers

One very important consideration for choosing your blade server is the type of embedded management license you need.  I’ve seen organizations attempt to save money by going with the low end license offering for systems management only to find out it doesn’t include a crucial feature.  One such feature is the ability to see trends and get early warnings from a server before it alerts.  In this blog post I’m going to talk about the iDRAC license options for Dell EMC blade servers including a comparison of the different license versions and why you may want them.

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PowerEdge VRTX Gets an Extended Life

Last week, Dell EMC announced extended life for the PowerEdge VRTX.  The announcement stated that Dell EMC would be offering VRTX through the end of 2022.  The PowerEdge VRTX is considered a “datacenter in a box” with up to 4 blade servers and 25 hot-pluggable shared drives inside of a tower or 5U system.  Continue reading

2019 – Year in Review

As we wrap up this decade, I wanted to take the time to say thank you.  While I created this blog to help me create a repository of blade server information, this blog has grown to provide (hopefully) valuable information to you.  In reality, without you I wouldn’t have a reason to continue writing on this blog– so thank you!  As you may know, this blog is my personal hobby.  I do not seek nor receive outside funds to help with the costs, I do it for enjoyment.  My biggest challenge continues to coming up with content that is not specific to one vendor.  As we move into the new year, I hope you will reach out to me if you come up with ideas of blade server topics you’d like to see.  Enough of this – let’s take a look at what was hot in 2019.

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Dell EMC Launches Something New, But Don’t Refer to It as AI

Earlier this month Dell EMC unveiled their newest solution of products that combines all of their core products into one system known as PowerOne.  This new system will be fully-engineered and highly-automated with autonomous operations and flexible consumption options and is being positioned as “Autonomous Infrastructure” – but don’t call it AI.  If you haven’t heard of Autonomous Infrastructure before, it’s because it’s a new category for products that are beyond Converged Infrastructure. The Dell EMC PowerOne combines PowerEdge MX blade servers with PowerMax storage and connects it via Dell EMC Networking while protecting it with Dell EMC Data Protection.  I’ll go more into the components at the end of this post, but first I want to focus on what makes PowerOne unique – the automation. Continue reading

Overview of the Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect

Earlier this year Cisco announced and has begun shipping the Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect (FI).  The Cisco UCS 6454 offers line-rate, low-latency, lossless 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Fibre Channel functions.  In this blog post I provide an overview of what you can expect in this fourth generation FI and provide some things you need to be aware of before migrating. Continue reading

UCS vs PowerEdge MX – Comparison of Admin Tasks

Principled Technologies released a report earlier this month that compared certain administrative tasks between a Cisco UCS blade server solution and a Dell EMC PowerEdge MX solution and the results were quite surprising. Continue reading

What Workloads Are Running on Your Blade Servers?

Higher CPU core counts and faster memory speeds are expanding the use case for blade servers.  In years past, a majority of users would say they use blade servers for a dense platform for virtualization.  Today, I think there are more workloads than virtualization running on blade servers, but I need your help to decide if my speculation is true.  Continue reading