Dell’s integrated Remote Access Controller, or iDRAC, is a great tool, but you need to make sure you purchase the version that best meets your needs. In this blog post, I’ll help clarify the pro’s and con’s of each as well as provide you an eval key to help you see what you may be missing.
Tag Archives: Dell
IDC Worldwide Server Tracker – Q4 2014 Released
IDC released the Q4 2014 Quarterly Server Tracker last night and it revealed that Dell has taken the #2 server spot with 16.7% market share.
Blade Server Comparisons – March 2015
It’s always good to have a single source of comparisons for the Tier 1 blade servers, so here is the updated list. I realize that I should have posted this in December, but I guess it’s better late than never. Continue reading
Dell PowerEdge FX2 Solution Increased Density and Simplified Setup vs HP Solution
A newly released paper from Principled Technologies shows the Dell PowerEdge FX2 took 133 fewer steps to deploy 42 servers vs an HP server solution in 62.8% less time.
Questions Answered About Dell’s 2nd PERC in VRTX
I had a reader email me with a few questions about Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX 2nd PERC, so I thought I’d write about it with the intent on helping others. If you have other blade-related questions (whether Dell or not) let me know and I’ll see what I can find.
A First Look at Dell’s FX Architecture
Today Dell announced a new server architecture that combines characteristics of both rack servers and blade servers into a new architecture, known as PowerEdge FX. Today I’ll give you a first look into the platform. First off – according to Dell’s Product Development team, this platform was not designed to replace Dell’s blade server portfolio. Instead it was created to help bridge the gap between blade servers and rack servers. As you look at this new infrastructure, you may ask is it really a “blade server?” I’ve always claimed if it shared power, cooling and networking, it’s a “blade server” however I’ll let you form your own opinion. Continue reading
Choosing the Right Memory for Your Blade Server
With the advancement of CPU architecture, identifying the best options for memory within your server has become more challenging. Should you use a single DIMM or does multiple DIMMs make a difference? What about memory speed – does it really matter? Should you buy single rank (SR), dual rank (DR) or quad rank (QR) DIMMs. I’m not going to pretend to be a memory expert, but hopefully I will help answer these questions in today’s post. Continue reading
A First Look at the Dell PowerEdge M630
The PowerEdge M630, Dell’s newest blade server based on the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 was announced today. Although specifics haven’t been officially posted on Dell’s website, a video releasing some highlights of the newest member to the PowerEdge family was found on YouTube by Gartner Analyst, @Daniel_Bowers, so here is a quick look at it.
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.
Why Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX is Ideal for Virtualization
I recently had a customer looking for 32 Ethernet ports on a 4 server system to drive a virtualization platform. At 8 x 1GbE per compute node, this was a typical VMware virtualization platform (they had not moved to 10GbE yet) but it’s not an easy task to perform on blade servers – however the Dell PowerEdge VRTX is an ideal platform, especially for remote locations. Continue reading