Spec'ing a VDI host in 2026: GPU, RAM density and users-per-host (UK)
A VDI host is not a general virtualisation host with desktops bolted on. The economics live and die on users-per-host, and that number is set by three things working together: how much frame buffer each session needs, ho…
JBOF and NVMe flash enclosures: when all-flash disaggregation makes sense (UK 2026)
A JBOF, a just-a-bunch-of-flash enclosure, is the all-NVMe answer to a question that storage architects have asked for years: why should fast drives be trapped inside the server that happens to own them? Instead of scatt…
Building a file and NAS server: capacity, ZFS or Storage Spaces and 10/25GbE (UK 2026)
A file server looks like the simplest box in the rack until you have to build one that stays fast for fifty people, never loses a byte and still has room to grow in three years. Capacity is the easy part; the decisions t…
Building a file and NAS server: capacity, ZFS or Storage Spaces, and 10/25GbE (UK 2026)
A file server is one of the easiest builds to get wrong, because it looks simple and is not. Buy too few spindles and rebuilds take days; pick the wrong filesystem and you inherit a snapshot and integrity story you did n…
DIMM population rules: how to fill memory slots for full bandwidth (UK 2026)
Two servers with identical CPUs and the same total RAM can differ by a third in memory bandwidth, purely because of how the DIMMs were placed in the slots. Memory population is not cosmetic - it decides whether you get t…
Supermicro GPU SuperServer buyer's guide: cost-effective AI inference and training nodes (UK 2026)
When a team needs more accelerators per pound than an integrated appliance will give them, the open-hardware route usually points at Supermicro. Its GPU SuperServer families cover everything from a single workstation-cla…
HPE ProLiant DL320 Gen12 buyer's guide: single-socket 1U for edge, VDI and dense hosting (UK 2026)
The reflex when buying a 1U HPE server is to reach for the dual-socket DL360. For a large share of real workloads that is a socket too many. The ProLiant DL320 Gen12 is a single-socket 1U built for exactly the jobs where…
NVMe-oF in the data centre: disaggregating flash from compute (UK 2026)
For years the fastest storage in a server lived inside that server, bolted to its PCIe bus, stranded the moment the box was busy or idle. NVMe over Fabrics breaks that link. It lets a pool of flash sit in its own enclosu…
Scale-out vs scale-up storage: choosing an architecture before you buy hardware (UK 2026)
Before you compare arrays or price drives, there is a more fundamental fork in the road: do you grow storage by making one system bigger, or by adding more systems that act as one? Scale-up and scale-out are not just two…
How to spec a VMware vSphere host in 2026: a UK build guide
Most virtualisation hosts are bought wrong in one of two directions: over-specified on cores you'll never licence, or under-specified on memory and RAM-bound within a year. This is the build framework our engineers use w…
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