Eye on Blades Blog: Trends in Infrastructure : blade infrastructure

Is Power Capping ready For Prime Time

Tony Harvey — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:06:00 GMT

Mike Manos responded to my post about power capping being ready for prime time with a very well thought out and argued post that really looks at this from a datacenter manager's perspective, rather than just my technology focused perspective. I'm...(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)

Designing infrastructure the way IT wants to work

Gary Thome — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 07:46:00 GMT

We've been on the Adaptive Infrastructure journey at HP for several years now. This week we are announcing an important milestone: BladeSystem Matrix. We've been really thinking a lot about how customers use IT and ways we can optimize IT infrastructure...(read more)

Mike Klayko, CEO of Brocade nailed it

newtonja — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:49:00 GMT

I'm a sucker for unscripted honesty. Kudos to Mr. K for taking a deep breath after Cisco's UCS and Project California grandstanding to put some reality in front of the rhetoric. In less than 3 minutes, he really boiled all the hype down and simply articulated what a lot of our customers and partners are thinking too. Watch his video....(read more)

Did we miss something?

Gary Thome — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:35:00 GMT

Every time a competitor introduces a new major product we can't help but notice they suddenly get very interested in what HP is blogging during the weeks prior to their announcement. Then when they announce, the story is always a big self-congratulatory "we've figured out what the problem is with existing server/blade architectures". The implication being that blades volume adoption is somehow being constrained by the very thing they have. ...(read more)

9 Trends in 2009: What's Hot and What's Not in the Data Center

newtonja — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:30:00 GMT

We can’t let Illuminata, Gartner, IDC and Forrester have all the fun, so we sat down and came up with our own What’s Hot and What’s Not in the Data Center list for 2009. Read on for the top 9 things in '09 plus the runner-ups that just missed the list. If you don't see your hot button in 2009 here, let us here about it!...(read more)

BladeSystem Supercomputers

Gary Thome — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:34:00 GMT

The latest Top 500 supercomputer list just got released. BladeSystem c-Class was well represented once again. With 201 entries (40.2%) of the top 500, it has the most entries of any product line. The ever popular ProLiant BL460c made up the most entries...(read more)

10Gb Ethernet: Divide and Conquer with Virtual Connect Flex-10

Gary Thome — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:53:00 GMT

Moore's law has usually been used to predict general trends in semiconductors. While not exactly a perfect analogy, we have seen trends in interconnect bandwidth increase. Ethernet has seen bandwidth increase ten-fold every few years, with the latest transition to 10Gb. Usually these transitions take a while because the costs to transition are high, and the transition to 10Gb has followed that trajectory - until now. ...(read more)

Thermal Logic – The coolest ideas for your hottest problems

Gary Thome — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:46:00 GMT

Today we are announcing some significant Thermal Logic innovations. I'm sure if you're reading this first, you are thinking "wait, here comes another vendor claim that they are most energy efficient!" I'd hate to disappoint you, but we do believe that addressing power and cooling challenges is much more than just a server that takes less power. Okay we do have a new energy efficient blade server. In fact we have a portfolio of energy efficient blades servers. But wait, there is more! Really! ...(read more)

When is choice not choice?

Gary Thome — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:36:00 GMT

Following on the heels of our virtualization launch last week, Dell made a virtualization announcement of their own yesterday. They announced a variety of third party products they now support and re-announced the blades servers they introduced last week, but this time referring to their virtualization design. Curiously they compared their two-socket M805 full-height 16-DIMM blade to our four-socket blades, ignoring our two-socket half-height 16-DIMM ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade announced last week. I guess comparing their blade against an HP blade that is half the size wouldn't have sounded as good. ...(read more)

Blade Standards: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Richard Fichera — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:00:00 GMT

There's been a rash of coverage in the trade press recently about the role that lack of standards plays as an inhibitor to the blades market. But before we run away in the direction of standards, we need to answer a fundamental question - do we loose more than we gain by designing and building standard blade servers, and how different is the real data center environment today when considering vendor lock-in in an environment of standard servers? ...(read more)

Games vendors play . . . with power efficiency claims

Gary Thome — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:13:00 GMT

These days, server power efficiency is top of mind for everyone. Five years ago, most customers had no idea how much power a server used. Now, everyone knows - its a lot. In some cases, customers are making power consumption the primary criteria for vendor selection. So why is it so dang hard to get a straight story on exactly what options are the most power efficient? We'll fill you in on the dirty little secrets you need to know. ...(read more)

One million and counting

Gary Thome — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:16:00 GMT

1,000,000. One million. 106. No matter how you write it, that is a big number. I’ve never tried to count to one million. But now we have sold our millionth blade server; which is cause for reflection....(read more)

Part 2: Q&A on blades and storage

lee.johns@hp.com — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:17:00 GMT

In my last post , I promised to talk more about the big picture regarding storage for your bladed infrastructure. Once your blade infrastructure is established, you have already gone through an exhaustive analysis of how it will save you money & benefit...(read more)