What is VDI? How Virtual Desktops Work in 2026
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) hosts desktop environments as centrally managed virtual machines on host servers, created from OS-and-application…
SQL Server Licensing Explained: Cores, CALs & Editions
Navigating sql server licensing is one of the most consequential procurement decisions an IT team will make, where a misunderstanding of licence metri…
How Does vMotion Work? VM Live Migration Explained
How does vMotion work? VM live migration relocates an active virtual machine between physical hypervisor hosts with no planned downtime, typically avo…
vGPU vs GPU Passthrough: Virtualisation Guide
Deploying graphics and compute acceleration within modern hypervisors forces IT leaders to resolve a fundamental architectural trade-off: full GPU pas…
OCP NIC 3.0 Explained: Server Network Slots Decoded
Modern enterprise servers increasingly complement traditional motherboard-integrated Ethernet with dedicated, open-standard mezzanine bays such as OCP…
What Is a BOSS Card? Server Boot Drives & OS Mirroring
A BOSS card (commonly expanded as Boot Optimized Storage Solution) is Dell's branded dedicated boot RAID device designed to host and protect a server'…
Hot-Swap Server Components Explained: What You Can Pull Live
Modern enterprise server platforms treat hot-swapping as a chassis-level engineering discipline rather than a blanket hardware feature. While field en…
Server CPU TDP Explained: Watts, Turbo and Real Draw
Thermal Design Power (TDP) is the maximum continuous heat, measured in watts, that a server CPU's cooling system must dissipate under sustained refere…
Server Power Supply Explained: Redundancy, Titanium, Sizing
Buy a server with two power supplies and it's tempting to assume you've bought resilience and headroom in one line item. You haven't necessarily bough…
Bare Metal vs VM vs Container Explained (2026 UK Guide)
Ask three engineers to define a server in 2026 and you'll get three different isolation boundaries: a dedicated chassis, a hypervisor-carved virtual m…
BMC Out-of-Band Management Explained: iDRAC, iLO, XCC 2026
Every server sold today contains a second, much smaller computer that most admins never think about until something goes wrong. This is the Baseboard …
Server Form Factors Explained 2026: Rack vs Tower vs Blade
A single 42U rack cabinet can hold 35-40 individual 1U servers in roughly 0.6 square metres of floor space — a density that explains why choosing betw…
PCIe Lanes and Slots Explained: Gen5, Gen6, Bifurcation
Every GPU, NIC and NVMe drive draws from the same finite pool of CPU lanes — and that pool is smaller than most configuration tools admit. A single Ge…
Xeon 6 vs EPYC Turin Explained: Server CPU Naming Decoded
AMD's 192-core EPYC 9965 (Turin) lists at $14,913, against $17,800 for Intel's own 128-core Xeon 6980P (Granite Rapids) — a snapshot recorded in late …
Confidential Computing Explained: Intel TDX vs AMD SEV-SNP 2026
Encryption at rest and in transit is now standard practice, but data sitting in RAM has traditionally been plaintext — visible to the hypervisor, the …
Server CPU Cores, Threads & Chiplets Explained (2026)
Intel's next flagship server chip, Xeon 7 Diamond Rapids (due in 2027), will come in 192- and 256-core versions, but open the package and you'll find …
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