Tag Archives: HPE

Available 4th Gen Intel Xeon CPUs by Blade Server Vendor

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything new.  This is partly because blade server news has practically diminished; or I’m just getting really bad at finding “blog-worthy” content.  Either way, in this post, I thought it would be helpful to take to post a comparison of CPUs by blade server vendor. Continue reading →

Can You Run GPUs on Blade Servers?

In the past, a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) was equated to a workload that was designing something, like building automobiles.  However, over the past few years, organizations have realized that GPUs have more value than utilization in Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML).  In fact, a large majority of recent GPU adoption revolved around utilization of GPUs with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).   As we look at a “modular infrastructure” (aka blade server) environments, having multiple servers within a small footprint is ideal for VDI.  In today’s blog post, I’m going to review what each blade server vendor offers for GPU options. Continue reading →

What Blade Servers Are Certified as VMware vSAN Ready Nodes?

In this day and age, 99% of datacenter environments are virtualized, however a fraction of those environments are using virtualized storage, aka “vSAN”.  I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the full 1000+ page list of VMware vSAN Ready Nodes and deduct all non blade server systems.  In this post, I’ll be highlighting only blade server vSAN Ready Nodes. Continue reading →

Are Vendors Getting Out of the Blade Server Market?

I recently was asked, am I seeing server vendors exiting the blade server market?  If so, what are they selling in place of blades?  Honestly, I was surprised by the question.  The only whisper of any exits from the blade market were stirred up last year with the rumors of Cisco exiting.  I address that in this post, but I wanted to see if there was any validity into what was being asked, so I dug around.  I was surprised by what I found. Continue reading →

Are Multi-Node Systems a Better Option Than Blade Servers?

Lately I’ve been having discussions around “futures” with customers and one topic continues to be over ongoing interest.  What will blade servers look like with the expectations of CPU TDPs continuing to increase?  Looking into the future, it’s very clear that CPUs are going to create an obstacle for blade server users.  TDPs are going to grow to the point where “air cooling” may not be sufficient for all workloads.  This will force blade server users to make a choice.  Continue reading →

A Review of Blade Server Market Share

Every quarter IDC publishes market data for blade server vendors.  In the past I’ve only covered the top 4 main stream vendors, Cisco, Dell Technologies, HPE and Lenovo.  However, I recently came upon IDC’s full list of blade server vendors so I thought it would be good to share.

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