Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN migration: the playbook for UK enterprises moving from Viptela
Cisco renamed Viptela SD-WAN to Catalyst SD-WAN in 2023 — but the platform underneath continues to evolve in two divergent directions: the long-term IOS-XE Catalyst SD-WAN platform that Cisco is investing in, and the ori…
SXM vs PCIe GPUs and EDSFF storage explained: AI hardware form factors
Two acronyms decide how an AI or storage server is physically built, and both confuse buyers who are otherwise comfortable reading a spec sheet. SXM versus PCIe is the question of how a GPU plugs into the system and how …
Dell PowerEdge R660 buyer's guide: the 1U workhorse for dense virtualisation (UK 2026)
The Dell PowerEdge R660 is the server most UK virtualisation estates are quietly built on: a dual-socket 1U box that packs two current Xeon CPUs, a full set of DDR5 memory channels and a row of NVMe into a single rack un…
Proxmox VE and Hyper-V host hardware: what to buy when you leave VMware (UK)
Plenty has been written about whether to leave VMware after Broadcom's pricing changes. Far less has been written about the hardware question that follows the decision: the server you specified for vSphere is not automat…
Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 V3 vs V4: the 1U mainstream upgrade decision (UK 2026)
The ThinkSystem SR630 is Lenovo's flagship 1U, and for years it has been a quiet, reliable default for virtualisation and general compute. The arrival of the V4 generation puts buyers in a familiar spot: a still-plentifu…
1U vs 2U vs 4U servers: a form-factor buyer's guide for 2026 (UK)
Rack height looks like a trivial line on a quote, but it quietly decides how many drives you can fit, whether a GPU will physically go in, how the box is cooled, and how many servers a rack will hold. Choosing 1U, 2U or …
vSAN ready nodes in 2026: certified hardware, disk groups and sizing after Broadcom (UK)
A vSAN cluster is only as supportable as the hardware underneath it, and vSAN is unusually fussy about that hardware. Buy a server that merely looks adequate and you can end up with a configuration VMware will not suppor…
Specifying a Veeam backup repository: hardware for a hardened, fast-restore target (UK 2026)
Plenty of guides tell you which backup software to buy. Far fewer tell you how to build the box the backups land on — and a badly-specified repository is where slow restores and broken immutability come from. This is how…
HPE ProLiant DL340 Gen12 buyer's guide: the storage-dense 1U newcomer (UK 2026)
Most 1U servers force a hard trade: you can have compute or you can have drives, but not many of both. The ProLiant DL340 Gen12 is HPE's answer to that compromise, a 1U designed to carry an unusually generous number of d…
What is a DPU (SmartNIC)? Offload, isolation and vSphere DPU explained
A DPU, or data processing unit, is the third programmable processor that has quietly appeared inside modern servers, alongside the CPU and the GPU. In its more familiar guise it is a SmartNIC: a network card with its own…
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