This is all well and good, but most of the Enterprises I currently deal with use Blade Servers that lack PCIe slots. Most of the time they use SANS for extra storage as most Blades have One or Two SAS bays on them. More 3.5" SAS SSDs with larger SLC and eMLC capacities are needed more than PCIe cards.
Not sure what blades you are familiar with but HP has several options to run storage with Blades without SANs. You can either run a PCIe Expansion blade slaved to an adjacent blade server that would allow you to run this card. Or you can look at a D2200sb storage blade, also slaved to an adjacent blade server, which can take up to 12 SSDs (or regular drives). With the D2200sb you can even run HP's Lefthand virtual SAN software that will allow the storage blade to be shared out to any other blade in the chassis (but it requires a blade server to run that software).
However all these options burn an additonal bay (not counting the server blade itself) that may or may not be available in the chassis, or if you have to move the server blade to another chassis the storage has to go with it.
Yes, these options are available from most of the Blade vendors but they consume valuable space and bays. I typically deal with two companies that fit in this category both use IBM Bladecenters. I don't know why they went with IBM, that was before my time. What I do know is they are both former Dell customers and where unhappy with the service and quality of the machines they where purchasing. They both have a few older HP servers they aren't really using. I have no idea why HP didn't fit the bill. I do know neither of them will even consider using PCIe storage. They want to run 2.5" and 3.5" SAS drives in their systems. My assumption is that RAID arrays make them feel safer???
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Einy0 - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
This is all well and good, but most of the Enterprises I currently deal with use Blade Servers that lack PCIe slots. Most of the time they use SANS for extra storage as most Blades have One or Two SAS bays on them. More 3.5" SAS SSDs with larger SLC and eMLC capacities are needed more than PCIe cards.CoreLogicCom - Monday, June 4, 2012 - link
Not sure what blades you are familiar with but HP has several options to run storage with Blades without SANs. You can either run a PCIe Expansion blade slaved to an adjacent blade server that would allow you to run this card. Or you can look at a D2200sb storage blade, also slaved to an adjacent blade server, which can take up to 12 SSDs (or regular drives). With the D2200sb you can even run HP's Lefthand virtual SAN software that will allow the storage blade to be shared out to any other blade in the chassis (but it requires a blade server to run that software).However all these options burn an additonal bay (not counting the server blade itself) that may or may not be available in the chassis, or if you have to move the server blade to another chassis the storage has to go with it.
Just FYI.
Einy0 - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link
Yes, these options are available from most of the Blade vendors but they consume valuable space and bays. I typically deal with two companies that fit in this category both use IBM Bladecenters. I don't know why they went with IBM, that was before my time. What I do know is they are both former Dell customers and where unhappy with the service and quality of the machines they where purchasing. They both have a few older HP servers they aren't really using. I have no idea why HP didn't fit the bill. I do know neither of them will even consider using PCIe storage. They want to run 2.5" and 3.5" SAS drives in their systems. My assumption is that RAID arrays make them feel safer???