On September 4th, Cisco released a new line of modular servers under the UCS family known at the M-Series. Interesting enough, though, Cisco’s not calling the new servers “blade servers” but instead they are taking a play out of HP’s Moonshot playbook and calling them “cartridges.” The M-Series won’t be available until Q4 of this year, but in this blog post, I’ll highlight the information Cisco has provided. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Cisco
IDC Worldwide Server Tracker – Q2 2014 Released
The Q2 2014 IDC Worldwide Server Tracker was released on August 26, 2014 and it reported that the demand for x86 servers improved in 2Q14 with revenues increasing 7.8% year over year in the quarter to $9.8 billion worldwide as unit shipments increased 1.5% to 2.2 million servers. HP led the market with 29.6% revenue share based on 7.4% revenue growth over 2Q13. Dell retained second place, securing 21.2% revenue share.
7 Lessons Learned From Cisco UCS
Here’s a summary of the lessons learned with Cisco UCS from the Cisco LIVE 2014 session titled, “BRKCOM-3010 – UCS: 4+ Years of Lessons Learned by the TAC”.
IDC Reports Increased Blade Server Growth in Q1 2014
The quarterly IDC Worldwide Server Tracker was released on May 28, 2014 and it reported that in spite of a decrease in overall server sales, blade servers continue to increase with HP leading the way. To save you the task of reading all of the irrelevant server data, here’s a summary of their blade server findings:
IDC Reports Worldwide Blade Server Market Revenues Increase in Q4 2013
IDC came out with their Q4 2013 worldwide server market revenue report on February 27, 2014. Unfortunately I missed the announcement due to email issues, so I’ve decided to streamline things and summarize the report.
Intel E5-4600 v2 CPU Announced
Intel announced the refresh of their 4 socket E5 line taking the CPU up to 12 cores, and 30MB of shared cache and supporting memory speeds up to 1866 MTS DDR3 DIMMs.
I’ve updated the current blade server comparison list to include the E5-4600 v2 offering:
Direct link to PDF (117kb): BladesMadeSimple_Blade_Server_Comparison_3.12.14
If you see anything missing or incorrect, let me know.
Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com. He has over 17 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.
Blade Server Comparisons – Feb 2014
This update includes blade servers with the Intel Xeon E5-2400 v2 CPU. I’ll add the E7 v2 once they begin shipping (and I have some data).
Link: BladesMadeSimple_BladeServer_Comparison_updated2.26.14
Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com. He has over 17 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.
New Blade Servers Based on Intel E7 v2 Announced
The Intel Xeon E7 v2 CPU was officially announced today advertising 2x the performance, 3x the memory and 4x the I/O bandwidth compared to previous generations. For more information on what the E7 v2 CPU offers, as well as what blade servers were announced, continue reading below.
Is Microsoft Planning On Releasing a Blade Server?
A recent patent search shows an application by Microsoft on December 19, 2013 for a “Tray and Chassis Blade Server” hinting that Microsoft may be ready to get into the server hardware market.
Comparison of x86 Blade Servers
(UPDATED 11.5.2013) I often find myself seeking basic information for competitive blade servers, so I decided to sit down and put together a basic list of blade server details for Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM blade servers. The details provided are based on information publicly available and may be subject to errors. Continue reading