Blade servers of Dell
 

I have heard that they consume very less energy and the performance is also better. If it is so then its really good for small offices to choose Dell. Has anybody used blade servers of Dell? what are your reviews?

I haven't used one, but I'm a little scared of the customer service and support Dell offers. I've only heard bad things about it, so I really don't know...

Never heard of them. What's a blade server and what does it do? Can you give me more info? I'm very curious. Thanks a lot!

I personally have worked with Dell for a number of years and never really had any issues with them. Saying that, I've only ever used them in environments where I have large volumes of systems, and never load a single application onto a single server therefore eliminating some of my risk.

As with any blade centre, I do not yet see the total beneficial cost in running them - yes, the management is easier etc.. but the power used by a fully loaded blade chassis is often great than that of the individual servers. Couple this with the fact that in the majority of data centers, you will only get one chassis per rack due to maxing out the power usage they don't really give you a saving in space either - this applies to all blade based servers, not just Dell BTW!

I would like to know what is the power consumption of a Blade chasis in terms of AMPS and VAC.

Luckily, Dell provide you with just the tool for this purpose! A handy power calculator so you can figure out the max it will draw! They are generally over eager, and predict more usage than the real world... but thats the best way to be IMHO!

Planning for Energy Requirements with Dell Servers, Storage, and Networking

Dell blades or SUN Blades
 

Hi,

First of all I have to disagree with Schumie, I have seen banks where they were able to fully load the rack with blades. So I believer you really can save on space and power with blades, though I am still curious which vendor to go with. As of our company budget we only can afford SUN or Dell Blades. As far the comparisons I had seen on the web it seems Dell is making a better blade than SUN. The best detailed comparison I had found so far was

SUN blade server vs Dell Blade Server

Though as this is going to be a quite big investment for our company I would like to make sure I take the best decision on it. If you really can help me on choosing the best one of the two I would really appreciate it. Please let me know which one you think is better & why.

Thanks for your help in advance.
Julie Cole
Virtualization Team - Vmware ESX/ESXi - MS Hyper-V - ESX server; tutorials, how-to, video

Hi Julie,

Where are you locating your equipment? Is it your own data centre, which you are building fresh, re-using existing facilities you have or collocating in someone else’s relatively new facility?

All of the above will factor in to your decision - space is generally not a problem for data centres now and is of negligible cost. However, power and cooling is the killer. For example, if you fill a rack full of blades/ servers, how are you gaining the power and cooling density?

In respect of your choice of manufacturer, Sun and Dell obviously have very different offerings. I would suggest that you get both vendors to supply you with hardware, and actual run some performance tests. Depending on which model of Sun's you go for and your application behaviour, you may find that they have a slower processor speed, but due to the density of cores, and memory bandwidth available your application will perform faster for example.

They makes it easy to find the perfect tower,rack or blade servers.With a clean sheet to create a versatile server portfolio with increased memory capacity and I/O rates for intense applications in demanding environments.

The power calculator tool provided by Dell is an excellent one, which is very useful especially for colocated servers. It will give an idea about the total power usage by the systems in the rack instead of getting its details from the datacenter.