Hardware

Most servers shipped from the major manufacturers today come with some type of out-of-band management tool or baseboard management controller (BMC). Two of the most popular of these are HP’s Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) or Dell’s Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC). Both the iLO and iDRAC have features that specifically address systems management as defined by the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF) Common Information Model...

Servers come in several different configurations. In the data center, decisions about blade server vs. rack server vs. tower server will affect performance, data center space, budgets, and scalability. This article is a quick start guide to rack servers, blade servers, tower servers: how to understand their advantages and shortcomings, and how each type fits into your server requirements. Before we go in-depth, let's look at...

Some server operating systems were built to last the test of time. The IBM AS/400 is one such system. The AS/400 (Application System/400) was first introduced by IBM 25 years ago in June of 1988, and it's a system that is still alive and well today in 2013. Though the core server operating operating system that constituted the AS/400 is still alive, the name AS/400...

Enterprise organizations have embraced blade servers for hosting increasingly large sets of mission-critical applications that rely on scaling and availability. The marriage of cloud technology and hardware in hybrid networks has proven to be a valuable infrastructure for reliably supporting these applications.  However, even with the introduction of the cloud, network hardware still consumes large amounts of space and energy. Load balancing has enabled organizations...

Hard drive failures are a fact of life: That's why there are RAID arrays, backup systems and an entire infrastructure designed to prevent data loss and minimize the impact to an organization when drives stop working. Too hot makes for better reliability than too cold, brand new disks should be kept away from disks already in production and three other tips that may surprise you. But...