Tag Archives: Lenovo

Overview of the Industry Top Blade Chassis

It occurred to me that I created a reference chart for showing what blade server options are available in the market (“Blade Server Comparison – 2018“) but I’ve never listed the options for blade server chassis.  In this post, I’ll provide you with overviews of blade chassis from Cisco, Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo.  One of the things I’m not going to do is try and give Pro’s and Con’s for each chassis.  The reason is quite obvious if you have read this blog before, but in a nutshell, I work for Dell EMC, so I’m not going to promote or bash any vendor.  My goal is to simplify each vendor’s offerings and give you one place to get an overview of each blade chassis in the market.

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Lenovo First to Announce Blades with New Intel CPUs

On June 20th, Lenovo released information about their upcoming blade servers built on the upcoming Intel Xeon processor: the two processor ThinkSystem SN550 and the four processor ThinkSystem SN850.  Although there doesn’t appear to be any spec sheets yet on the products, there are a few things that can be extracted from the published 3D tour. Continue reading →

Helpful Blade Server Links

Here is a list of blade-related websites that may help you find more information about blade servers.  Since vendors tend to move their sites without notice if you find a dead link, please let me know.  If you have other sites that you think are worthy to remember, email me at “kevin AT bladesmadesimple.com”.
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Storage Options for Blade Servers

As technology trends like software defined storage (SDS) become more adopted in data centers, it will be interesting to see how it will impact the blade server market – especially with current research showing an expectation of growth over the next 5 years.  To succeed, blade server vendors will have to find ways to adopt to changing technology trends- especially SDS.   Continue reading →

GPUs and Blade Servers – A Good Idea?

UPDATED 9.23.2016 When looking at the blade server market, the options for GPUs are very limited – in fact only a couple of vendors offer them (more on this later.)  So you have to question, is it a good idea to put a GPU in a blade server?  Let’s review and find out. Continue reading →

IDC Worldwide Server Tracker Shows 5.1% Growth in Q3 2015

IDC published their Q3 2015 findings last week, and the results were overall positive.  In year over year revenues, the worldwide server market saw revenues increase of 5.1%, or $13.4 billion, the sixth consecutive quarter of growth while shipments grew 4.5%, or 2.49 million units.  Specific to blade servers, IDC reported Dell’s blade server revenue grew faster than that of any of the top 5 vendors at 34.8%, however Cisco remained at the #2 blade server market share holder behind HP. Continue reading →

Gartner Releases New Magic Quadrant for Modular Servers – May 2015

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a Gartner Magic Quadrant for blade servers as they discontinued it in 2014.  Last month, Gartner created a new Magic Quadrant to replace the older one.  The newest Magic Quadrant incorporates both blade servers and multi-node servers. According to Gartner, “the separation of the blade and multinode server markets has become harder to maintain as multinode servers adopt the technology characteristics of blade servers. With the evolution of new modular server designs, the concept of traditional server blades will fade in favor of increasingly variable ‘bricks’ or ‘cartridges.’ Consequently, a Magic Quadrant that tracked only the blade server market could only deliver partial value. This new Magic Quadrant is designed to better reflect the evolving market for any servers that display modular characteristics.”  You can view the full article here, but I’ve summarized their findings for the top modular server vendors below.

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