Dell PowerEdge FX2 Converged Architecture

The Dell PowerEdge FX2 is a 2U rackmount blade chassis with a common infrastructure allowing servers and storage to share power, cooling, network switching, and chassis management. When it was announced last fall, there were two options: the FC630 two-socket, half-width Xeon blade, and the FM120x4, an Intel Atom–based microserver option. Dell quietly started shipping …

The Security of Converged Infrastructures

On the January 2, 2014, the Virtualization Security Podcast was joined on the spur of the moment by @Josh_Atwell, who works for VCE, to discuss the security of converged infrastructures. This was of particular interest to me due to my current research on the security of a VCE Vblock. The research got me thinking about …

Nutanix OS 3.5: Deduplication, New GUI, SRM, Hyper-V Support

Nutanix, one of the fastest growing IT infrastructure startups around, shows no signs of slowing down with their release of Nutanix OS 3.5. For those not familiar with Nutanix, they offer a truly converged virtualized infrastructure. This generally consists of four nodes in two rack units of space, where each node has CPU, RAM, traditional fixed disk, SSD, and Fusion-IO flash built in. Their secret sauce is really NDFS, the Nutanix Distributed File System, built by the same folks that created Google’s File System, as well as a unified, hypervisor-agnostic management interface.