Eye on Blades Blog: Trends in Infrastructure : BladeSystem

A Blade Thanksgiving

Daniel Bowers — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:21:00 GMT

Thursday is the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, a time when families often get together to give thanks for the things they most appreciate. I snapped this pic inside one of the server development labs at HP; it looks like even the 'extended family'...(read more)

Reduce application deployment times with HP BladeSystem Matrix ISV Solutions

Kristie Popp — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:01:00 GMT

Joe Sullivan Microsoft Technical Solutions Engineer - APS With the HP BladeSystem Matrix, you can radically change the way applications are deployed in your datacenter. Matrix provides an integrated platform of infrastructure (server, storage, and network...(read more)

Extending BladeSystem Matrix through ISV partnerships

Kristie Popp — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:55:00 GMT

By Karl Paetzel HP Enterprise Solution Alliances This week HP announced new investments to extend the value of BladeSystem Matrix through our ISV partnerships. Matrix is HP’s integrated offering of platform hardware, software, and services that...(read more)

Three Opinions (But One Counts More)

Daniel Bowers — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:32:00 GMT

I saw three new opinions about BladeSystem last week. First, PC World Latin America announced that the HP BL490c G6 virtualization blade won in the "Best Server" category of the annual PC World Latin America 2009 Awards . These awards honor...(read more)

BladeSystem Firmware Management

Daniel Bowers — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:39:00 GMT

Here's a new BladeSystem best-practices whitepaper on the topic of firmware: HP BladeSystem ProLiant firmware management best practices It talks about different scenarios for firmware maintenance (like local vs. remote, online vs. offline), and goes...(read more)

VMware Certification of G6 BladeSystem Servers (ProLiant BL460c, BL490c, BL495c)

Kleinch — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:32:00 GMT

We get lots of questions regarding VMware and what HP servers are certified on the various VMware Operating Systems. They do have a Hardware Compatability List (HCL) and we just wanted to let you know which of the latest G6 BladeSystem Servers are on...(read more)

Primer on iSCSI and the permutations on BladeSystem

Kleinch — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:10:00 GMT

As iSCSI becomes more popular as an interconnect technology for storage and other devices, we had received a lot of questions as to how, why, what, works with iSCSI and the components of HP BladeSystem. So, Dan Bowers and Ed McGee put together a primer...(read more)

Managing HP servers through firewalls with Insight Software

Kleinch — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:32:00 GMT

I came across an interesting white paper that identifies possible ways of managing HP servers with HP Systems Insight Manager and Insight Software deployed in the area of the network that is considered more secure than the standard production network...(read more)

Installing and configuring HP-related components in Essential Business Server on an HP BladeSystem c3000 chassis

Kleinch — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:53:00 GMT

To fully use the features in the c3000 hardware, you must be able to add and configure software in EBS. This updated customer-viewable document covers installation of SNMP, Support Pack, Management Packs and how to add HP updates into Microsoft® System...(read more)

Applications Matter - What Affects Server Power Consumption: Part 2

Tony Harvey — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:21:00 GMT

How does the application you are using and what it is doing affect the power consumption of system. The first thing that everyone looks at when talking about power consumption is CPU utilization. Unfortunately CPU utilization is not a good proxy for power...(read more)

Icosikaitetra-Core Server Blades

Daniel Bowers — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:46:00 GMT

Yesterday, AMD launched "Istanbul" , their six-core Opteron processor. Paul G. promised that HP would add this CPU into our servers in very short order. "Very short" was right; today we've announced the BL465c G6 and BL495c G6...(read more)

Taking a closer look at the "Power On" capabilities for blade chassis

Kleinch — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:55:00 GMT

Some of our Blade Specialists give us the workings of the BladeSystem "Power switch" . David gives us these words of wisdom. "I've always referred to the "power switch" on the front of the blade not as a power switch but a...(read more)

Virtually (and literally) #1

Daniel Bowers — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:41:00 GMT

This week we released VMMark results for the new HP BL490c G6 server blade. The scores establish the BL490c as the highest performing 2-socket server blade for virtualization -- eclipsing blades offered by IBM, Dell, and Cisco. By the way, this 2-socket...(read more)

Chargeback Glitch

Daniel Bowers — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:25:00 GMT

Here’s a story about unexpected behavior prompted by some chargeback rules at Pfizer . (By 'chargeback' I mean the budgeting scheme where IT resources are metered, then costs are attributed to the business units that consume them.) Larry Cannell...(read more)

Least Favourite Question

Tony Harvey — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:15:00 GMT

I'm sitting here thinking about writing my first Blog post and trying to come up with something to say. So I figured I'd start by trying to answer one of my least favourite questions (and before you all start to correct my spelling I'm not...(read more)