Whether you are getting started with your first Dell™ PowerEdge™ M-Series blade or looking to optimize a farm you already have, the Dell TechCenter offers articles, demos, and peer discussions to help you. Here are a few:

• Blades-focused Ask the Expert TechTuesday chats at 3 PM including Bulking Up Blades Deployment on 9/9/08, Dell PowerEdge M805/905 on 9/16/08, and Dell-Cisco Blade Switches on 9/23/08. If you’re not able to make these live, submit your questions ahead of time to the featured speaker by starting a thread on the bottom of the chat pages and then check back later to see what the attendees had to say.
• The Blades Installation Cookbook offers a detailed, step-by-step guide for hardware setup. Tools to customize your OS installation scripts include the Deployment Toolkit page and Systems Build and Update Utility demos.
• For monitoring the chassis and blades, the Blades Management page is a good starting point that includes transcripts of chat discussions and demonstrations of remote monitoring and management with the iDRAC and CMC.
• Blade Power Monitoring with ITA highlights the Dell OpenManage™ console with the OpenManage Systems Management page being the starting point for all products and demos. There are also many resources to help with Switching to Dell Systems Management.
• Details of using FlexAddress to assign network identities to slots rather than physical blades have been covered in previous chats and a demo.

New to the Dell TechCenter? Check out the site walkthrough video introduction.

Blades Web Chat Topics

Every Tuesday at 3 PM U.S. Central, we host a chat session around IT topics. These three Web chats focus on the following blade areas:

9-9-08 - Bulking up Dell Blades

9-16-08 - Dell PowerEdge M805 and M905 Blades

9-23-08 - Dell/Cisco Blade Switch Solutions