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ShareCisco's UCS Next Year's Servers This Fall
Posted by Howard Marks on July 1, 2009
When the rest of the blogosphere went crazy over Cisco's UCS announcement pronouncing it the biggest change in the data center since the microprocessor I was skeptical to say the least. While others touted they had management software that did the admin's job for him and revolutionary networking that made IBM and HP blade servers look like Model T Fords. I failed to understand the excitement.
To me UCS was another player in the blade server market. After all I had just, ok a month before, been reading reports from some of the same analysts that were now touting UCS as a breakthrough saying that Dell was no threat to IBM, HP and Sun (OK they missed that one) because their biggest server was a 4 socket x86. If Dell wasn't and enterprise player because they didn't have big Unix systems or mainframes how was Cisco with just 3 models of 2 socket blades that much better?
Wondering if I might be wrong I went back to the Cisco site and found almost no details about the hardware just platitudes about how the integrated servers, management software, networking and storage would make everyone's life easier. This confused me even more as UCS has no storage. Not even the storage blades HP has running Lefthand that let you run a whole branch office from a single blade chassis. EMC blogger Chuck Hollis was even saying UCS was better for not having storage as the HP storage was something you couldn't tell from Shineola.
I even went to LULU.COM, bought, and read, Silvano Gai's book looking for what made UCS different.
Comment by Calvin Zito on July 2, 2009 9:41 PM
Where is Shineola and is that where Chuck is from?
Chuck was out proclaiming that UCS (with EMC of course) was brave new thinking. We don???t see it as brave new thinking (see http://bit.ly/zrKZ4, a blog post we had when UCS was announced).
Chuck has spent the last two years trying to convince anyone that will listen that HP is a server company because he's clearly very worried about HP as a total systems vendor. He knows that HP has the whole portfolio today - storage, servers, networking, software and services. EMC as a storage only vendor had to cozy up with Cisco. With the bladeservers gaining traction, storage only vendors like EMC won't last much longer. Complete infrastructure solutions like HP's BladeSystem, HP POD, and Ultimate Virtualization Infrastructure are addressing customers demands for total infrastructure today.
Chuck can keep taking pot-shots at HP - the more he does, he sounds like he's full of ....well, Shineola.
By the way, we have a lot more to say on other storage topics on our blog at www.hp.com/storage/blog.
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Comment by HP Runs Scared on July 3, 2009 4:36 PM
HP Systems Insight Manager
HP Insight Power Manager
HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager
HP BladeSystem Integrated Manager
HP Service Essentials Remote Support Pack
HP System Management Homepage
-------------------------
That???s quite a slew of products to manage HP blades. What a great job integrating a Ponzi scheme of software stacked, on top of another, heaven forbid if any of them fail though, then the entire system management house of cards falls in on itself. It's so complex HP had to announce an integration service "Matrix" where HP factory people configure the multitudes of software on the servers them ship the house of cards to you and expect the average IT team to manage it. Yes... great story there Calvin. The fact that an HP product manager responds to a public post, and touts their own complex layers of management as being ground breaking, is proof positive HP is scared.
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Comment by Steve Kaplan on July 6, 2009 4:00 AM
Howard, I have to disagree with your premise ??? UCS is indeed revolutionary. If anything, Cisco tends to understate the product???s capabilities. Keep in mind that UCS was designed as an optimal hosting platform for a virtualized data center. From a performance standpoint, therefore, 384 GB of RAM per blade server makes perfect sense ??? especially when hosting desktop VMs. The ability to offload network I/O is similarly a virtualization specific compute benefit. Virtualization performance enhancement, though, is only a small part of the story. UCS???s biggest differentiator is its ability to optimize a virtualized data center by uniting the server, storage and network resource provisioning and management. UCS, along with vSphere, provides the foundation for converting the disjointed computing of the physical realm into a unified computing platform.
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Comment by Omar Sultan on July 6, 2009 10:55 PM
Howard:
Thanks for taking the time to investigate our new UCS platform. A couple of thoughts on your comments.
With regards to the memory density (48 DIMM slots or 384GB), it comes into play for our customers in a couple of different ways. As you mention, it allows a single blade to support a higher density of virtual machines or virtual desktops; however, for customers with more typical memory requirements, they can meet them more inexpensively, since the large number of DIMM slots allow them to use smaller, less expensive DIMMS. Finally, the ability for a CPU to access that much memory allows certain memory intensive apps to be moved to a blade that might not have worked out otherwise.
As far as storage connectivity, the FCoE is currently internal to the system. "Upstream", the UCS seamlessly connects to the existing Fibre Channel and Ethernet infrastructure--from a storage perspective, it is non-disruptive.
Personally, I believe the game changer is UCS manager the and the single point of management and administration it provides. As you may be aware, UCS uses the the concept of service profiles to provide automated, policy driven bare metal provisioning for both physical and virtual servers. These service profiles include everything from identity info (WWN, MAC, network config) to things like firmware rev levels and boot order. This allows us to deliver a stateless computing model for our UCS customers. For more details, check out http://tr.im/r95u http://tr.im/r95M and http://tr.im/ozcI . By the way, this is also all available through a documented XML API, so third-party mgmt tools or even applications themselves can directly provision the system.
Regards,
Omar Sultan
Cisco
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Comment by Calvin Zito on August 8, 2009 4:22 AM
@HP Runs Scared
The last time I checked, ponzi schemes required money to be spent. Your first software title on the list is shipped free with HP Servers and Storage. You might want to be sure you actually know what your talking about instead of repeating what was in that internal email that your competitive team sent you.
Next, you haven't even listed the software that is recommended with BladeSystem Matrix. Really, if your going to attack the competition, at least have some clue what you're talking about.
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