As you can see, it is very narrow, not very tall and probably 2/3rd the depth of a regular server. The design is very, very neat and simple. 16 x DDR2 RAM slots will allow 8GB per slot, giving you potential for 128GB RAM (we've gone for 16GB for now) in each physical server. 2 x Quad-Core Processors per Blade at upto 2.7GHz (the spec we've gone for) and 2 x on-board 10Gbit NICs (Network Interface Cards) mean heavily specified but very small, efficient hardware.
On top of this spec you can also specify additional connectivity hardware in the form of 'Mezzanine' cards, which are essentially PCI-Express slots in a different form factor. There are 2 of these slots per Blade and we have utilised both slots on all of our Blades.
Slot 1 is a 2-port 1Gbit NIC. (for the purposes of VMware VMotion and High Availability)
Slot 2 is a 2-port 4Gbit Fiber Channel Card. (for fast connection to the Fiber Channel SAN)
I am a Dell employee and I think your blog on blade servers is very informative. According to me, blade servers have become more and more popular because of the wide usage area and standard technology.
ReplyDelete