Eye on Blades Blog: Trends in Infrastructure : networking

DCE = Deprecated

Daniel Bowers — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:15:00 GMT

If I'm interpreting the comments from Bob Nusbaum correctly, then Cisco has decided to stop using the term "DCE" (Data Center Ethernet), and will use the terms "CEE" or "DCB" going forward. That's a good move. As...(read more)

Is this UCS confusion...or dandruff?

Daniel Bowers — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:04:00 GMT

On Wednesday, Soni Jiandani announced an expansion of Cisco’s UCS family , adding rack servers to their hardware roadmap. I’m really scratching my head at this move. Soni says that her goal with these products – 1U and 2U servers each...(read more)

Question: What does “receive path validation” do and what could be the reason for the failure?

Kleinch — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:20:00 GMT

This one of the methods used to provide fail over for network traffic. From our BladeSystem support staff "This is just a “redundancy mechanism” that is part of the HP Teaming driver. Not trying to over simply things but here it goes. NIC A and NIC...(read more)

Why doesn't networking obey Moore's Law?

newtonja — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:57:00 GMT

Every 18 months, customers around the world expect to see server performance double for the same or less cost. As you know, it's been this way for some time; a consequence of a little idea called Moore's Law. The good and bad of Moore's Law - great for customers, challenging for server businesses. Our team would tell you that it just takes years of practice to keep up. My question today is "why doesn't networking obey Moore's Law?" ...(read more)

Aaron Delp: Traditional Expansion Options for Blades and Virtualization

newtonja — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:23:00 GMT

Aaron continued his series, ' Blades and Virtualization Aren’t Mutually Exclusive ' this week. It's a very good read, especially if you're new to virtualization on blades and trying to figure out the best configuration. Part 3 covered...(read more)

Blade Hacks: NIC teaming recommendations with Virtual Connect

newtonja — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:43:00 GMT

A simple question came across the virtual watercooler yesterday and the experts weighed in with some great advice. Question: What are the recommended NIC teaming options when using Virtual Connect? Any conditions where one setting would be preferable over another? ...(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)

Why Blades? Less wires.

newtonja — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:51:00 GMT

There are a lot of reasons to move to blades and we love to include most, if not all in our typical sales pitch. Power, cooling, space, money, time, flexiblity, yada, yada, yada. But today, I just want to talk about one aspect of Why Blades: Less wires (or 'dramatic cable consolidation' in IT marketing speak)...(read more)

A customer viewpoint on Dell blades vs HP blades

newtonja — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:35:00 GMT

I ran across a blog post from one of our customers who wanted to see if the grass was greener on Dell's side of the blade fence. I thought some other folks out there might like to see his perspective and thought process. You can read it here on the...(read more)