Well it is February already and I am just now fulfilling one of my New Year’s resolutions – to start blogging more often. So here I go.
Last week, I had the opportunity to spend a few minutes chatting with Steve Kaplan, a vice president at INX, a Cisco reseller. Steve is also the author of the blog “By the Bell” where late last year he compared Cisco UCS to HP BladeSystem Matrix. He and I had the chance to compare our points of view on the applicability of blades. Needless to say, our point of view here at HP is quite different from Steve’s support of UCS.
Here is a summary of a couple of areas that perhaps Steve and I do not yet see eye to eye.
1. We at HP do not see UCS as comparable in functionality to BladeSystem Matrix, which we believe is in a category by itself. Why is this? Unlike other offerings that manage servers or VMs one at a time, Matrix uniquely allows customers to provision and manage the infrastructure of an entire application all at once – all the servers, VMs, storage, networks, and server images – through a service catalog based provisioning portal. Further, Matrix also has built-in capacity planning tools and disaster recovery tools that are not found in UCS.
2. We believe that data center power and cooling are substantial costs and challenges for customers and warrant significant attention. It appears to me that Cisco has largely ignored this in their UCS design. Not mentioned in Steve’s analysis is the ability for BladeSystem to throttle the power consumption of most chassis components that consume power including CPUs, memory, fans and power supplies to keep infrastructure running efficiently all the time. Also not mentioned is that UCS requires up to double the amount of data center power allocated per server compared to BladeSystem.
While Steve’s analysis is very detailed, he omits general descriptions of the very capabilities of BladeSystem and BladeSystem Matrix that have made BladeSystem the most popular blades platform on the planet – with over 1.6 million blades sold. (These can be found at www.hp.com/go/bladesystem and www.hp.com/go/matrix). Anyone interested in hearing more of what I have to say about converged infrastructure and BladeSystem can check out this Information Week article.
I appreciate Steve taking the time to write on blades, one of my favorite topics! I hope the dialogue over what customers find important for their IT infrastructure continues, as this is an important topic for our industry. Our many years in the blades business has taught us a lot, and we always look forward to the opportunity to share with customers the technologies we can bring to help them save time, reduce power and cut costs associated with managing IT infrastructure, all while becoming more efficient.
