Dell's Soviet style two-year plan results in fresh blade servers

Box Reduction

HP (in EMEA) now offer full factory integration on ALL Proliant servers from regular tower models through to Blades. Not only is this open to their direct enterprise customer base but it is also accessible by any channel reseller via an HP distributor (HP Top Config). The pick and mix option approach is great for next day availability but rarely are 100% of the parts in the channel which means a back order on the vendor (10 day wait anyway!). So you might as well just order it in one box and have everything turn up in one go!

Will Dell only offer factory assembled?

HP and IBM offer either factory built or "bunch of boxes" type deliveries. The latter offers their channel partners the chance to make some revenue by offering build services, or their customers with the skills to save some cash by self-assembly. It will be interesting to see if Dell's new-found love for the channel translates into the same type of setup, otherwise their channel partners may just stick to pushing HP and IBM (or any of the other brands that allow build services).

As it's a blade discussion, I have to insert a cheeky note to IBM - so why do you think they copied the HP blades then?

nice box, shame about the management

Lets face it, dell's management piece is the pits, it isn't getting any better and HP have both IBM and Dell licked on that front. so who cares if it saves you $2600 when it'll cost you $10k in lost man hours configuring the damn thing when you try and reconfigure it at 3am due to unreasonable client changes, using remote hands, or the on call engineer who didn't set it up. HP still have the edge as far as I'm concerned kit wise, but who among us mere mortals has a datacentre we can run 12 - 24kw to each rack in? (2 to 4 x chassis fully loaded) even being 16% more efficient, you're still not able to put 2 chassis in one rack, let alone 4 no matter which vendor you use :( yes, yes, getting the coat now (pulls anorak off peg) :)

Major Savings

Just wait till I explain to my boss that he can save two whole hours of my time if he goes with Dell - that will save him a whole £20 or so !

Yes, HP and IBM can factory integrate too...

but you pay extra for it. Dell's is included in the cost and they also test the integrated unit, versus just assembling the pieces. Big difference.

RE: cheeky note to IBM - why do you think they copied the HP blades?

El Reg already answered this for you: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/20/dell_blade_third/

Dell poached an HP Blade exec and basically copied HP's product. Note they also copied all of the limitations of HP's product also. Multiple single points of failure for the half height blades, three switch fabrics when four will be needed for redundancy with high speed ethernet and SAN. Switching power supplies on and off for efficiency which makes them heat up and cool down causing reliability issues and causing power measurement anomalies in the data center and using an untested fan design. They also abandoned their previous product and customers like HP did with pClass. This leads to the previous product being worthless; lowering trade in value and increasing lease rates. It is not always good to copies another's product, especially when you copy their deficiencies as well. Way to go Dell.

RE: RE: cheeky note.....

Lol, gotcha!

I particularly love the line "....using an untested fan design"! Priceless! How exactly is it "untested"? I also don't feel very abandoned seeing as I can still order new p-Class blades, chassis and switches, but HP do insist on still charging me for them so I assume they don't believe the "worthless" bit either. Please don't take it personally when say I nearly fell off my chair laughing at the switching PSUs causing "power measurement anomalies"! Where do you get this stuff, I thought the Hollywood comedy scriptwriters were on strike?

Just calm down, take a deep breath, and admit it - IBM have lost the blades war. ;)

RE: RE: RE: cheeky note.....

As I remember HP gave customers nearly 18 months to transition from P to C class. maybe you can order them, but they are end-of-Life because HP couldn't pur current technology in an old design (and neither can IBM despite their claims.) Backward compatibility doesn't count unless you can actualy turn the blades on !!

To quiesce an unneeded power supply is not the same as "turning it on and off" anymore than a TV is ever actually "turned off."

Granted Dell may not do the extensive testing of an IBM or HP, but "untested" is laughable.

Dell poached a guy with intimate knowledge of the c-class design (whatever happend to non-compete contracts?) They probably did a pretty good copy.

I wonder what their strategy is to combat IBM and HP inn terms of management software. HP in particular is pretty good, especially at accomnodating virtualization.

Between VMWare and Xen physical servers are becoming ever so much less relevant as each day passes.

Despite your enthusiam

.. as well as tendency to play rather loosely with facts vs. your opinion, the market seems to have chosen HP as the preferred vendor of blades (or so the IDC numbers would indicate.)

Your tendency to use disparaging adjectives like "toy" and denigrating HP's engineering (which apparently has resulted in pretty good power numbers in real-world test) would seem to indicate that you may have some vested interest in promoting IBMs less popular platform. Employee ?? Reseller ??

IBM has released a number of Youtube videos which were pretty ludicrous in their attempts to disparage HP's kit. So far, have not seen such retaliatory behavior from HP.

I do not sell physical servers for a living, so I have no bets on either (or Dell for that matter.)

In the end, the market will decide, and considering the proprietary nature of blades, and their "stickiness" in data centers, I understand the desperation partisans feel.

However, until the day I am a better engineer than the boys in Houston, I would not criticize nor second-guess their designs.

RE: sarcasm

1. "Untested Fan Design. By untested I mean untested over time...." All new designs are therefore "untested"? What you're really saying is HP carefully engineered a new part to maximise efficiency, whereas IBM went scrabbling through the parts bin.

2. "By pClass blades being worthless, I mean try to trade them in or get a good lease rate on them..." Strange, but our IBM salesgrunt keeps offering large sums as trade-ins to swap our p-Class out for IBM BladeCenter. I assume he hasn't been told they're "worthless".

3. "By power anomalies. As power supplies are loaded up and down by switching them on and off they become more and less efficient rendering it difficult to measure and accurately predict power efficiency levels in data centers because the efficiency changes...." Just watch the electrickery bills go down instead, it makes the beancounters happy!

4. "Someone mentioned '....unless you can actually turn the blades on !!.'" This is probably someone who bought BladeCenter and only then realised you can't run all the blades maxed out at once, despite the number of PSU upgrades IBM has thrown at their chassis. Ever seen a CIO make an instant decision? Try telling him that it's a good idea to buy two half-full chassis 'cos you can only run that many fully-spec'd and maxed out, whereas the HP chassis can. No amount of golf days will win that argument!

Don't worry, you won't have to suffer such abuse for long, IBM will probably sell the whole x86 bizz to Lenovo next year! It will have to be Lenovo as it doesn't look like Dell are interested.