Eye on Blades Blog: Trends in Infrastructure : why blades

Pity the "Server Guy"

Daniel Bowers — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:15:00 GMT

My brother-in-law David manages a mid-sized construction business, and owns seven or eight servers to handle the data. But don't bother asking him how much data they hold, or what processors they use. In fact, it's pointless to ask anyone in his...(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)

Aaron Delp Busts Blade Power Myths

newtonja — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:06:00 GMT

Aaron Delp has started a series on blades titled "Blades and Virtualization Aren't Mutually Exclusive" where he shares a ton of personal research and experience with blades. Check out his first two articles where he busts the blade power myths....(read more)

Server Product of the Year!

newtonja — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 14:00:00 GMT

We have to pause and bow to our NonStop brethren who took home the GOLD in SearchDataCenter.com's products of the year. Especially sweet is they knocked off the IBM z10 mainframe. Read more about it and see what we mean by "Blade Everything"....(read more)

Tips for SAS storage and blade server

newtonja — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:50:00 GMT

In the blade world, external SAS storage is the new kid on the block. We see this category growing a lot in popularity in 2009, mostly because it's cheap, familar and pretty flexible for the server administrator to carve up storage in different ways...(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)

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)

Why blade servers and virtualization

newtonja — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Earlier this week, we talked about the new virtualization blade and why it's a perfect fit for virtual servers. Here's 7 of our most influential customers explaining why blade servers and virtualization have been a big win for their business....(read more)