A white paper released today by Dell shows that the Dell M1000e blade chassis infrastructure offers significant power savings compared to equivalent HP and IBM blade environments. In fact, the results were audited by an outside source, the Enterprise Management Associates (http://www.enterprisemanagement.com). After the controversy with the Tolly Group report discussing HP vs Cisco, I decided to take the time to investigate these findings a bit deeper. Continue reading
Tag Archives: HP
Cisco Announces 32 DIMM, 2 Socket Nehalem EX UCS B230-M1 Blade Server
Thanks to fellow blogger, M. Sean McGee (http://www.mseanmcgee.com/) I was alerted to the fact that Cisco announced on today, Sept. 14, their 13th blade server to the UCS family – the Cisco UCS B230 M1.
This newest addition performs a few tricks that no other vendor has been able to perform. Continue reading
VMworld 2010: Up Close and Personal with HP and Dell Blades
Last week at VMworld 2010 I had the opportunity to get some great pictures of HP and Dell’s newest blade servers. The HP Proliant BL620 G7, the HP Proliant BL680 G7 and the Dell PowerEdge M610X and M710HD. These newest blade servers are exciting offerings from HP and Dell so I encourage you to take a few minutes to look. Continue reading
(UPDATED) The Best Blade Server Option Is…[Part 1 – A Look at Cisco]
Updated on 9/13/2010 with link to Sean McGee’s I/O Card Blog Post
One of the questions I get the most is, “which blade server option is best for me?” My honest answer is always, “it depends.” The reality is that the best blade infrastructure for YOU is really going to depend on what is important to you. Based on this, I figured it would be a good exercise to do a high level comparison of the blade chassis offerings from Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM. If you ready through my past blog posts, you’ll see that my goal is to be as unbiased as possible when it comes to talking about blade servers. I’m going to attempt to be “vendor neutral” with this post as well, but I welcome your comments, thoughts and criticisms. Continue reading
What Does it Take to Design an HP Blade Server?
What’s the process to design an HP blade server? Find out on my interview with Gary Thome, Chief Blade Architect for HP. Thanks to the friends at SDR News, I was able to talk with Gary at the HP Tech Forum last month in Las Vegas. In the video below, Gary discusses the steps it takes for HP to design the next generation blade and he discusses the latest blade servers announced at the HP Technology Forum. Continue reading
New BL465c G7 and BL685c G7 (New Features)
Along with the Intel blade server announcements, Tuesday HP also announced two new AMD based blades, the BL465c G7 and BL685G7. Although originally viewed as a refresh of their existing AMD blade servers, while at the HP Tech Forum in Las Vegas, I found there were a few interesting facts. Let’s take a look. Continue reading
Mark Potter Reveals New HP BladeSystem Products – 6/21/2010 (#hptf)
At the 2010 HP Tech Forum press release on Monday, June 21, 2010, new HP BladeSystem products were announced. In the following video, Mark Potter, Vice President of HP Industry Standard Servers, reveals the newest HP BladeSystem products.
(UPDATED) FIRST LOOK: HP's New Blade Servers and Converged Switch
(Updated 6/22/2010, 1:00 a.m. Pacific, with updated BL620 image and 2nd Switch pic)
As expected, HP announced today new blade servers to their BladeSystem lineup as well as a new converged switch for their chassis. Everyone expected updates to the BL460 and BL490, the BL2x220c and even the BL680 blade servers, but the BL620 G7 blade server was a surprise (at least to me.) Before I highlight the announcements, I have to preface this by saying I don’t have a lot of technical information yet. I attended the press conference at HP Tech Forum 2010 in Las Vegas, but I didn’t get the press kit in advance. I’ll update this post with links to the Spec Sheets as they become available. Continue reading
More Blade Server Rumours
It’s been a while since I’ve posted what rumours I’m hearing, so I thought I’d dig around and see what I can find out. NOTE: this is purely speculation, I have no definitive information from any vendor about any of this information so this may be false info. Read at your own risk. Continue reading
HP Blades Helping Make Happy Feet 2 and Mad Max 4
Chalk yet another win up for HP.
It was reported last week on www.itnews.com.au that Digital production house Dr. D. Studios is in the early stages of building a supercomputer grid cluster for the rendering of the animated feature film Happy Feet 2 and visual effects in Fury Road the long-anticipated fourth film in the Mad Max series. The super computer grid is based on HP BL490 G6 blade servers housed within an APC HACS pod, is already running in excess of 1000 cores and is expected to reach over 6000 cores during peak rendering by mid-2011.
This cluster boasted 4096 cores, taking it into the top 100 on the list of Top 500 supercomputers in the world in 2007 (it now sits at 447).
According to Doctor D infrastructure engineering manager James Bourne, “High density compute clusters provide an interesting engineering exercise for all parties involved. Over the last few years the drive to virtualise is causing data centres to move down a medium density path.”
Check out the full article, including video at:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/169048,video-building-a-supercomputer-for-happy-feet-2-mad-max-4.aspx