As I wrap up my 7th year with this blog I wanted to take a minute to pause and say thank you. Without your interest in this blog post, I don’t think I would have stuck with it. I appreciate your ideas and your feedback / comments, even if I may not like what you say. As my final post of the year, I thought I would provide you with some insights on what was popular, what has been searched on, etc. If you don’t see something you’d like to know about, let me know in the comments below. Thanks for your continued interest, and Happy New Year! Continue reading
Tag Archives: blade servers
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
Workload Acceleration Options for Blade Servers
I recently was asked what the demand for NVMe drives was, so I pinged my peers to see where they are seeing the adoption of NVMe (in rack or blade servers forms) and got a pretty interesting response. This got me wondering what the options were for NVMe, as well as other acceleration technologies, in the blade server world. Here is what I found.
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
New Study Shows Dell Blades Outperform Cisco UCS
A newly published study by Principled Technologies reports in tests that the Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade environment delivered up to 91.7% greater throughput while running a virtualized OLTP database workload compared to a similarly priced Cisco UCS 5108 blade environment. In addition they found that the Dell environment delivered consistent scaling as blade servers were added versus the performance degradation observed in the Cisco environment.
A First Look at HPE Synergy Hardware
HPE introduced a new modular architecture in January called HPE Synergy – a new platform designed for composable infrastructure (read about this from Forbes here.) For this post, I’ll be focusing on the hardware components only with hopes of writing something up on the software piece in the future.
Dell Releases HTML5 and Redfish Support for iDRAC
With the launch of the new Intel CPUs, today Dell released the newest update of their iDRAC (integrated Dell Remote Access Controller) software which includes support for HTML5 (in other words, no more JAVA!!) Continue reading
Intel Releases Broadwell CPUs for Servers
Intel officially launched the E5-2600 v4 CPU (code name “Broadwell”) today for servers which adds extra cores and faster memory. Today’s release by Intel is not a major architectural CPU change, but instead an enhancement to their existing CPU offering. This means you probably won’t see any “new” servers released, but you will have new CPUs to choose from in the future. Before I go into the details of the E5-2600 v4, I want to take a second and help you understand Intel’s CPU strategy. Continue reading
Dell’s VRTX Gains New Storage Option
As I speak with customers about the Dell PowerEdge VRTX, one of the limits that often gets brought up is the fact that it”only” has 25 x 2.5″ or 12 x 3.5″ drive bays. That is no longer the case. In a quiet release in December, Dell began offering an extra option for VRTX which allows the chassis to connect with up to 2 x external MD storage arrays and share the storage with all servers.
5 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Dell Blade Servers
Recently I’ve had to do a lot of “why Dell” presentations and it occurred to me there are a few things about Dell blade servers that many people, including Dell customers, may not know about.