For something as critical to business success as data center and infrastructure technology decisions, deeper facts, functions, and features should be evaluated well beyond the glitz of a marketing promise.
This was my first reaction when I read a recent Network World article. This article sheds some interesting light on Cisco and its Unified Computing System (UCS). While the article has a lot of crisp images of new data center facilities and the equipment in them, there are some fundamental issues with the overall picture. So let’s take a step back and look at the ‘picture’ behind the picture.
An incomplete solution
The article notes, “Plans call for 90% of Cisco's total IT load to be serviced by UCS within 12 to 18 months.” So Cisco, by its own admission, has a 90 percent solution. What about the other 10 percent? Cisco is acknowledging it does not have a server platform for every workload in the data center. For instance, they do not have an integrated mission-critical solution, nor a Private Cloud solution that can be up and running in 30-days.
The HP view: HP has a 100 percent solution. HP offers Converged Infrastructure solutions based on the world-leading HP BladeSystem for any workload you have—from client to cloud, from desktop to Nonstop. You can make HP BladeSystem a strategic platform of choice for all your applications and realize the benefits of a common modular architecture—things like savings in time, cost and energy—with unprecedented agility.
More of the same
The article says the current anchor site for Cisco’s grand IT plan is a relatively new facility in the Dallas area that “is already outfitted with 1,400 UCS blades, 1,200 of which are in production, and 800 legacy HP blades.”
Let’s think about this. Cisco announced UCS in March 2009. It’s now almost 2011, so this means Cisco hasn’t been able to migrate many of its workloads to UCS in all the time that has passed since the UCS announcement. It’s still relying heavily on the HP BladeSystem. (We’ll take that as a compliment.). But where’s the agility, simplicity, and time-savings?
The HP view: In April 2010, HP announced it had completed the acquisition of 3COM. Within five months, HP announced that all six of its internal next-generation data centers were running company operations worldwide on HP Networking solutions, and were Cisco-free for core WAN routing and switching. HP has proven it has the expertise and the product portfolio to replace Cisco in the data center. Cisco is proving there’s a case for staying on HP blades—the world’s best-selling blades.
A networking story that doesn’t add up
The article notes that each UCS chassis in a cluster is connected to a top-of-rack access switch. “From that switch, storage traffic is sent over a 16Gbps connection to a Cisco MDS SAN switch, while network traffic is forwarded via a 40Gbps LAN connection to a Cisco Nexus 7000 switch. In the future, it will be possible to use FCoE to carry integrated storage/LAN traffic to the Nexus and just hang the storage off of that device.” The fact is HP Networking is taking bigger bites out of Cisco’s business – creating a semi-panicky position for them.
Wait a minute. Hasn’t Cisco been telling customers that all the standards and products were ready to support end-to-end FCoE today? What gives?
The HP view: As a complement to existing Ethernet, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel approaches, FCoE is a promising tool that can be used to reduce complexity and cost in storage networks. However, FCoE is not yet mature enough to support end-to-end FCoE networks and requires further evolution to provide open-standards compatibility and to unify management of traditionally-separate storage and server networks. HP is focused on providing practical customer benefits and recommends using FCoE for I/O consolidation at the server edge. This pragmatic approach (read the white Paper) reduces cost and complexity while it protects existing legacy Fibre Channel storage investments and makes sure existing storage and server network management practices are maintained. In this model, FCoE extends rather than replaces Fibre Channel. As FCoE approaches continue to evolve, HP will continue to evolve its products and solutions to sensibly address real world problems without risking on-going operations.
I know it’s typically not a good marketing practice to include your competitor “by name” as not to give them extra exposure. However, I never consider my blogs as a marketing platform, rather a candid information exchange. And from what I believe (or from my perspective) there are simply a lot of holes in the UCS story.
For now, let’s just keep a simple thought in mind: When Cisco talks about UCS, enjoy the pretty pictures but take the time to learn the story behind the story. And if you’d like, I invite you to dig deeper into the HP BladeSystem, the BladeSystem Virtual Connect portfolio, or the complete Converged Infrastructure story and architectural framework.
Thanks,
Duncan
