If you’ve been reading this blog over the past six months, you’ll know that I’ve continued to bust on Cisco for not providing market share numbers after selling their UCS product line for two years.  I believe the wait is now over.

I’m hearing rumours that this next week (May 23 – 27, 2011) we should finally be seeing Cisco’s UCS market share numbers.  From what I’m hearing, the numbers are going to be very positive for Cisco.  To be perfectly clear, I have not heard of any official market share numbers, but I know that IDC should be releasing their Q1 2011 Blade Market Share numbers next week so if the rumours are right, we’ll see Cisco on their chart.  I’ve heard from an unofficial source that Cisco sold about ~17,000 blade servers in Q1, 2011.  If this turns out to be true, I am not sure that Cisco UCS will be in the #3 blade server spot as Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, commented in a Cisco Financial Analyst Conference in Q4 of 2010: http://blogs.cisco.com/ar/john_chambers_discusses_ucs_market_share__wow/ 

Since I’m not an analyst, I can only wait until next week when “hopefully” the curtain will be lifted and we’ll finally get to see what the true story is behind Cisco UCS’ market share.

Stay tuned…

“A year from now the difference will be (Cisco) UCS (Unified Compute System) is dead and we have had phenomenal market share growth in the networking space…And customers are thrilled and partners are making a lot of money.” – Randy Seidl, VP of the Americas, Enterprise Servers Storage and Networking,  HP (April 26, 2010)

 
This was a quote found in CRN’s article a year ago, today,  from Randy Seidl, HP’s senior vice president of the Americas, Enterprise Servers Storage and Networking, who was tasked in leading the charge against Cisco.  Needless to say, it’s a year later, and Cisco UCS is still around but with much question around how much market share they own since they’ve yet to release market data to IDC or Gartner. 

Why Hasn’t Cisco Failed?
I’m not a market analyst – just a guy with a passion for talking blade servers, so my opinion as to why Cisco didn’t fail, as predicted by HP, is as much of a guess as anyone would have.  I can only speak on what I observe:

1. Cisco has PASSION- I firmly believe that in order to succeed, you must have desire.  Whether you are promoting blade servers or virtualization software, if you don’t believe in your product, no one will.  No matter who you talk to at Cisco, they will tell you that UCS is the best product on the market.  I haven’t seen that passion in any other vendor lately.  Perhaps other vendors could learn a thing or two from Cisco’s employees.
2. Cisco’s UCS Management is Unique - if you spend any amount of time watching Cisco demonstrate their management of the UCS, you will see that it’s a unique way of handling blade server resources.  Rather than try to explain, I encourage you to take a look at M. Sean McGee’s blog post from a few weeks ago: http://www.mseanmcgee.com/2011/04/the-cisco-ucs-advantage-series/

Now that we see that Cisco UCS isn’t going to die, what do they need to succeed in winning the blade server market share?  Here’s an excerpt from a blog post I wrote in January:

———–

The following are my recommendations / suggestions for Cisco.  The intention is not to bash anyone at Cisco, but to provide an outsider’s perspective of what I think needs to happen if Cisco wants to increase their UCS blade server market share.

Focus on Product Branding.  When you ask people what “ProLiant” is, a majority of the people know it is an HP server brand.  On the contrary, ask people what “UCS” is and fewer people know.  Why?  Partially because HP has been in the server space for many years, but it’s also due to a lack of branding by Cisco.  Sure, everyone knows the name Cisco – even commoners (people outside of the data center) recognize the logo from TV shows like 24 and movies.  Cisco does a GREAT job of getting the company name out, but needs to focus on getting the UCS brand out there a little more.

Create Public Configuration and Reference Tools.  I’m a hands-on type of guy, and when I want to see what my server options are, I want to go to the manufacturers’ web sites and configure the systems myself.  IBM has a nice stand-alone product configuration tool, while HP and Dell have great web-based tools that can help you design a blade server system.  When it comes to reference tools, HP has QuickSpecs while IBM has a very informative Redbooks collection.  However when we look at Cisco, the details and list price of a UCS configuration is held within the arms of the Cisco sales teams or Certified Partners.  I don’t quite understand the reasoning of this, but if Cisco shared their tools and materials to the general public it could increase the interest in the product.

—————–

To read my entire blog post, go to
http://bladesmadesimple.com/2011/01/what-cisco-has-to-do-to-win-the-blade-server-market/

So what do you think?  Will Cisco UCS survive or was HP’s prediction just a little early?  Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Over the past several months, there has been a lot of discussions about how 2011 is the year Cisco will become a leader in the blade server space.  There’s no doubt that there are a lot of customers who have moved to UCS,  but in reality there are a few other things that Cisco will need to do to win the top spot.  Today I’m going to discuss a few of these things.

The following are my recommendations / suggestions for Cisco.  The intention is not to bash anyone at Cisco, but to provide an outsider’s perspective of what I think needs to happen if Cisco wants to increase their UCS blade server market share.

Focus on Product Branding.  When you ask people what “Proliant” is, a majority of the people know it is an HP server brand.  On the contrary, ask people what “UCS” is and fewer people know.  Why?  Partially because HP has been in the server space for many years, but it’s also due to a lack of branding by Cisco.  Sure, everyone knows the name Cisco – even commoners (people outside of the data center) recognize the logo from TV shows like 24 and movies.  Cisco does a GREAT job of getting the company name out, but needs to focus on getting the UCS brand out there a little more.

Create Public Configuration and Reference Tools.  I’m a hands-on type of guy, and when I want to see what my server options are, I want to go to the manufacturers’ web sites and configure the systems myself.  IBM has a nice stand-alone product configuration tool, while HP and Dell have great web-based tools that can help you design a blade server system.  When it comes to reference tools, HP has QuickSpecs while IBM has a very informative Redbooks collection.  However when we look at Cisco, the details and list price of a UCS configuration is held within the arms of the Cisco sales teams or Certified Partners.  I don’t quite understand the reasoning of this, but if Cisco shared their tools and materials to the general public it could increase the interest in the product.

Change the UCS Partner Certification Requirements.  The last time I checked, for a business partner to become a full-blown certified partner with Cisco for the UCS product, they had to have a single engineer that was Network, Storage, Virtualization and Server certified.  While I get the idea that you want one person to be able to do everything, the reality is that is a challenging request.  For partners who have invested into IBM, HP and Dell products, getting certified on Cisco could be costly, as you have to ask your server/virtualization guy to become a network guy.  IBM, HP and Dell have similar requirements, but they allow for someone to have network certification, someone to have storage certification, etc.  Perhaps Cisco should follow suite and allow for the partner to have one person for each area instead of all-in-one.  This would attract more business partners to sell Cisco UCS which leads to more opportunities for Cisco to grow their market share.

Focus on SMB Market.  Who is the target market for UCS?  Obviously we see UCS making traction in large environments like co-location hosting facitilities where there is a large amount of virtual hosts, but what about the Small-to-Medium Business (SMB) Market?  When I look at the UCS model, I see a good fit where there are 8 or more VMware / Hyper-V hosts needed, but does Cisco UCS work in environments with 3 or 4 virtualization hosts?  Since Cisco UCS was first released in early 2009 the messaging was focused on “the Enterprise” data center.  If Cisco wants to take market share, they need to find a way to attract the smaller SMB space.

Get Bloggers Involved.  This last suggestion is based on the success that I’ve seen with HP.  They have created multiple “Technology Days” where they have invited bloggers of all sorts to participate.  In this event they provide access to the engineers who create their server and storage products.  In return, the bloggers are able to write up articles that discuss their opinions about the HP products.  I know that Cisco is looking into doing this, but hope they seriously consider it if they want to promote growth of the UCS line.

Innovate.  Need to add in a PCI Express card into a UCS blade server and you’ll be out of luck.  Cisco created the c-class SERIES rack server with intentions to offer customers the ability for larger I/O expansion.  They also recently added the capability to manage the c-class series rack servers with the Cisco UCS Manager allowing one management system for both the rack and blade server environments.  But what if Cisco created a PCI Express blade like IBM and HP offer.  Sure, this would take up a blade server slot, but it would allow for those users to keep it all in a UCS chassis instead of branching in a rack platform.  If Cisco didn’t want to create a PCI Express blade, what if they created a rack-based “shell” that allowed a user to populate with B200 blade servers.  The shell could be enabled to allow a user to have a couple of PCI Express expansion slots therefore providing the customer with the ability to standardize on the blade platform.  Don’t get me wrong – I love what Cisco has done with the Extended Memory on the B-250 blade server, but in order for them to grow in the market place they are going to have to innovate a lot more.

That concludes my thoughts on what Cisco needs to do to win the blade server market.  Let me know how you think they could do it in the comments below.

Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) is a bit unique in that the chassis is a small component of the overall offering. Cisco’s UCS is a “system” of components that consists of blade servers, blade chassis, fabric extenders and fabric interconnects. The blade chassis is called the UCS 5100. It is a 6 rack unit (6u) tall chassis that can hold anywhere from 4 to 8 blade servers (dependent upon the blade form factor). The chassis comes with 4 front-accessible 2500W single-phase, hot-swappable power supplies that are 92 percent efficient and can be configured to support non-redundant, N+1 redundant, and grid-redundant configurations.

The rear of the UCS5100 chassis offers 4 hot-swap blowers, 4 power plug connectors requiring 15.5A, 220-240V AC. There are also a pair of redundant fabric extenders. This is where Cisco’s design differs from everyone else. These “fabric extenders”, known as UCS 2104XP Fabric Extender simply extend the reach of the onboard 10Gb or Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) I/O fabric from the blade server bays to the management console, known as the fabric interconnect. I previously blogged that there were rumours at one time that there would be an 8 port version of the fabric extender, however to date, I have not seen any proof of this. The UCS 2104XP Fabric Extender provides 4 x 10Gb uplinks, so if you have 8 blade servers, you theoretically would be looking at a 2:1 ratio (8 blade servers to 4 uplinks.) There have been several comments and blog posts on the functionality of the fabric extender, including the infamous Tolly Report that received several comments from the Tolly Group, Cisco employees and HP employees – but in summary, the 4 x 10Gb uplinks are adequate for handling all the I/O that the max 8 blade servers can throw at it. Yes, you can put two in for redundant pathways as well. The Fabric Extenders connect in to the brains of the solution – the fabric interconnect. 

The function of the UCS 6100 fabric interconnect is to connect ALL of the UCS 5100 chassis to the network and storage fabrics.The Cisco UCS 6100 series fabric interconnect currently comes in two flavors – a 20 port (UCS 6120XP) and a 40 port (UCS 6140XP). A 20 port could connect 5 x UCS5100 chassis’ fabric extenders (4 ports x 5 chassis = 20) all the way up to 20 x UCS5100 (1 port per fabric extender). This last example doesn’t seem to be ideal, as you would be running up to 8 x blade servers’ 10Gb I/O traffic up a single 10Gb uplink – but, who knows – I’m not a networking guy, so I’ll have to leave those comments to the experts. Personally, I think that it’s a bunch of marketing fluff… 

When we look at the sheer capacity of the quantity of blade servers that you can fit into a 42u rack, we see that Cisco can offer a maximum of 7 chassis into a rack (6u tall). The stats below provide a good comparison between the different server offerings from Cisco. 

A few things to point out:

• there are no AMD options (Intel only)
• half-width blade servers have a 1 x I/O card whereas full-width blade servers have 2 x I/O cards    

I/O Card Options
Cisco offers 4 different I/O Network Card options for their blade servers:

• Cisco UCS 82598KR-CI 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter  – based on the Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller, which is designed for efficient high-performance Ethernet transport.
• Cisco UCS M71KR-E Emulex Converged Network Adapter – uses an Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller for network traffic and an Emulex 4-Gbps Fibre Channel controller for Fibre Channel traffic all on the same mezzanine card.
• Cisco UCS M71KR-Q QLogic Converged Network Adapter – uses an Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller for network traffic and a QLogic 4-Gbps Fibre Channel controller for Fibre Channel traffic, all on the same mezzanine card.
• Cisco UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Card -  a dual-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet mezzanine card that supports up to 128 virtual interfaces that can be dynamically configured so that both their interface type (network interface card [NIC] or host bus adapter [HBA]) and identity (MAC address and worldwide name [WWN]) are established using just-in-time provisioning.

Fellow blogger, Sean McGee, has written up a nice post on the Cisco UCS B-Series I/O Card Options.  I recommend you go read it (after you finish this post).  You can find Sean’s article here.

  (For more details on these card options, please visit http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10280/products_data_sheets_list.html)

 As you may notice, there are no card options with fibre-channel only or Infiniband.  This is part of Cisco’s UCS strategy – the network and the storage traffic travel over the same cable from the blade server though the fabric extender to the fabric interconnect where the traffic is separated into network fabrics and storage fabrics.  This design allows for Cisco to require a maximum of 8 cables (4 from each fabric extender) per blade chassis and as few as 2 cables (1 per fabric extender).  Compared to a traditional server environment using multiple 1Gb Ethernet and 4Gb fibre connections per connection, there is a huge savings in cables.

Chassis Switch Options

 As I have previously mentioned, the architecture of Cisco’s UCS blade environment takes an approach of “extending” the I/O connectivity from the blades to the fabric interconnect.  With this design, there are no “switches”, therefore there are no switch options.

Server Management

Cisco’s blade infrastructure management lies within the Cisco UCS 6100 fabric interconnect.  The base management software, called UCS Manager, is the central point of management for the entire UCS environment.  It manages the UCS system, including the blades, the chassis, and the network (both LAN and SAN) – configuration, environmentals, etc.  Take a few minutes to look at the UCS Manager software in this short video:

While the UCS Manager is rich in features, it does have the following limitations:

•(Hardware) Templates can NOT be shared across systems
•Available MAC addresses are scoped per UCS Manager instance (not across the Enterprise)
•Available WWN addresses are scoped per UCS Manager instance (not across the Enterprise)
•Available UUIDs are scoped per UCS Manager instance (not across the Enterprise)

Bottom line – the UCS Manager is limited to each UCS chassis and most of the features are manual steps.  Never fear, however.  Cisco offers BMC’s BladeLogic which adds the following:

•UCS template creation and editing
•Cross-UCS template management
•Cross-UCS MAC and WWN Management
•Local disk provisioning for UCS
•SAN provisioning for UCS
•ESX provisioning for UCS
•Consolidated UCS operator and management action
•Manages UCS resources, VMs, guest OS, and business applications

The catch, however, is that the BMC BladeLogic is an extra cost.  How much – I’m not sure, but it adds something…  Cisco has a really good simulator that highlights what you can do with the UCS Manager software, so if you are interested, take a few minutes to watch.  There is no narration, just a walk-through of the UCS Manager.  I also recommend you view in full screen:

So let me know what you think.  Is there anything I’m missing – anything else you would like to see on this?  Let me know in the comments below.  Make sure to keep an eye on this site as I’ll be posting information on Dell, HP and IBM in the following weeks.

“Oo-rah” (that’s for @jonisick) 

IBM BladeCenter H

Cisco UCS 5108

Server Density and Server Offerings: winner in this category is IBM. IBM’s BladeCenter E and BladeCenter H chassis offer up to 14 blade servers with servers using Intel, AMD and Power PC processors. In comparison, Cisco’s 5808 chassis offers up to 8 server slots and currently offers servers with Intel Xeon processors. As an honorable mention Cisco does offer a “full width” blade (Cisco UCS B250 server) that provides up to 384Gb of RAM in a single blade server across 48 memory slots offering up the ability to get to higher memory at a lower price point.

 Management / Scalability: winner in this category is Cisco.
This is where Cisco is changing the blade server game. The traditional blade server infrastructure calls for each blade chassis to have its own dedicated management module to gain access to the chassis’ environmentals and to remote control the blade servers. As you grow your blade chassis environment, you begin to manage multiple servers. Beyond the ease of managing , the management software that the Cisco 6100 series offers provides users with the ability to manage server service profiles that consists of things like MAC Addresses, NIC Firmware, BIOS Firmware, WWN Addresses, HBA Firmware (just to name a few.)

Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnect

With Cisco’s UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects, you are able to manage up to 40 blade chassis with a single pair of redundant UCS 6140XP (consisting of 40 ports.)

If you are familiar with the Cisco Nexus 5000 product, then understanding the role of the Cisco UCS 6100 Fabric Interconnect should be easy. The UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnect do for the Cisco UCS servers what Nexus does for other servers: unifies the fabric. HOWEVER, it’s important to note the UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnect is NOT a Cisco Nexus 5000. The UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnect is only compatible with the UCS servers.

Cisco UCS I/O Connectivity Diagram (UCS 5108 Chassis with 2 x 6120 Fabric Interconnects)

If you have other servers, with CNAs, then you’ll need to use the Cisco Nexus 5000.

The diagram on the right shows a single connection from the FEX to the UCS 6120XP, however the FEX has 4 uplinks, so if you want (need) more throughput, you can have it. This design provides each half-wide Cisco B200 server with the ability to have 2

CNA ports with redundant pathways. If you are satisified with using a single FEX connection per chassis, then you have the ability to scale up to 20 x blade chassis with a Cisco UCS 6120 Fabric Interconnect, or 40 chassis with the Cisco UCS 6140 Fabric Interconnect. As hinted in the previous section, the management software for the all connected UCS chassis resides in the redundant Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects. This design offers a highly scaleable infrastructure that enables you to scale simply by dropping in a chassis and connecting the FEX to the 6100 switch. (Kind of like Lego blocks.)

On the flip side, while this architecture is simple, it’s also limited. There is currently no way to add additional I/O to an individual server. You get 2 x CNA ports per Cisco B200 server or 4 x CNA ports per Cisco B250 server.

As previously mentioned, IBM has a strategy that is VERY similar to the Cisco UCS strategy using the Cisco Nexus 5000 product line with pass-thru modules. IBM’s solution consists of:

• IBM BladeCenter H Chassis
• 10Gb Pass-Thru Module
• CNA’s on the blade servers

Even though IBM and Cisco designed the Cisco Nexus 4001i  switch that integrates into the IBM BladeCenter H chassis, using a 10Gb pass-thru module ”may” be the best option to get true DataCenter Ethernet (or Converged Enhanced Ethernet) from the server to the Nexus switch – especially for users looking for the lowest cost. The performance for the IBM solution should equal the Cisco UCS design, since it’s just passing the signal through, however the connectivity is going to be more with the IBM solution. Passing signals through means NO cable

BladeCenter H Diagram with Nexus 5010 (using 10Gb Passthru Modules)

consolidation – for every server you’re going to need a connection to the Nexus 5000. For a fully populated IBM BladeCenter H chassis, you’ll need 14 connections to the Cisco Nexus 5000. If you are using the Cisco 5010 (20 ports) you’ll eat up all but 6 ports. Add a 2nd IBM BladeCenter chassis and you’re buying more Cisco Nexus switches. Not quite the scaleable design that the Cisco UCS offers.

IBM also offers a 10Gb Ethernet Switch Option from BNT (Blade Networks) that will work with converged switches like the Nexus 5000, but at this time that upgrade is not available. Once it does become available, it would reduce the connectivity requirements down to a single cable, but, adding a switch between the blade chassis and the Nexus switch could bring additional management complications. Let me know your thoughts on this.

IBM’s BladeCenter H (BCH) does offer something that Cisco doesn’t – additional I/O expansion. Since this solution uses two of the high speed bays in the BCH, bays 1, 2, 3 & 4 remain available. Bays 1 & 2 are mapped to the onboard NICs on each server, and bays 3&4 are mapped to the 1st expansion card on each server. This means that 2 additional NICs and 2 additional HBAs (or NICs) could be added in conjunction with the 2 CNAs on each server. Based on this, IBM potentially offers more I/O scalability.

And the Winner Is…

It depends. I love the concept of the Cisco UCS platform. Servers are seen as processors and memory – building blocks that are centrally managed. Easy to scale, easy to size. However, is it for the average datacenter who only needs 5 servers with high I/O? Probably not. I see the Cisco UCS as a great platform for datacenters with more than 14 servers needing high I/O bandwidth (like a virtualization server or database server.) If your datacenter doesn’t need that type of scalability, then perhaps going with IBM’s BladeCenter solution is the choice for you. Going the IBM route gives you flexibility to choose from multiple processor types and gives you the ability to scale into a unified solution in the future. While ideal for scalability, the IBM solution is currently more complex and potentially more expensive than the Cisco UCS solution.

Let me know what you think. I welcome any comments.

I wanted to post a few more rumours before I head out to HP in Houston for “HP Blades and Infrastructure Software Tech Day 2010″ so it’s not to appear that I got the info from HP. NOTE: this is purely speculation, I have no definitive information from HP so this may be false info.

First off – the HP Rumour:
I’ve caught wind of a secret that may be truth, may be fiction, but I hope to find out for sure from the HP blade team in Houston.  The rumour is that HP’s development team currently has a Cisco Nexus Blade Switch Module for the HP BladeSystem in their lab, and they are currently testing it out.

Now, this seems far fetched, especially with the news of Cisco severing partner ties with HP, however, it seems that news tidbit was talking only about products sold with the HP label, but made by Cisco (OEM.)   HP will continue to sell Cisco Catalyst switches for the HP BladeSystem and even Cisco branded Nexus switches with HP part numbers (see this HP site for details.)  I have some doubt about this rumour of a Cisco Nexus Switch that would go inside the HP BladeSystem simply because I am 99% sure that HP is announcing a Flex10 type of BladeSystem switch that will allow converged traffic to be split out, with the Ethernet traffic going to the Ethernet fabric and the Fibre traffic going to the Fibre fabric (check out this rumour blog I posted a few days ago for details.)  Guess only time will tell.

The IBM Rumour:
I posted a few days ago a rumour blog that discusses the rumour of HP’s next generation adding Converged Network Adapters (CNA) to the motherboard on the blades (in lieu of the 1GB or Flex10 NICs), well, now I’ve uncovered a rumour that IBM is planning on following later this year with blades that will also have CNA’s on the motherboard.  This is huge!  Let me explain why. 

The design of IBM’s BladeCenter E and BladeCenter H have the 1Gb NICs onboard each blade server hard-wired to I/O Bays 1 and 2 – meaning only Ethernet modules can be used in these bays (see the image to the left for details.)  However, I/O Bays 1 and 2 are for ”standard form factor I/O modules” while I/O Bays are for “high speed form factor I/O modules”.  This means that I/O Bays 1 and 2 can not handle “high speed” traffic, i.e. converged traffic. 

 This means that IF IBM comes out with a blade server that has a CNA on the motherboard, either:

 a) the blade’s CNA will have to route to I/O Bays 7-10
OR
b) IBM’s going to have to come out with a new BladeCenter chassis that allows the high speed converged traffic from the CNAs to connect to a high speed switch module in Bays 1 and 2.

So let’s think about this.  If IBM (and HP for that matter) does put CNA’s on the motherboard, is there a need for additional mezzanine/daughter cards?  This means the blade servers could have more real estate for memory, or more processors.   If there’s no extra daughter cards, then there’s no need for additional I/O module bays.  This means the blade chassis could be smaller and use less power – something every customer would like to have.

I can really see the blade market moving toward this type of design (not surprising very similar to Cisco’s UCS design) – one where only a pair of redundant “modules” are needed to split converged traffic to their respective fabrics.  Maybe it’s all a pipe dream, but when it comes true in 18 months, you can say you heard it here first.

Thanks for reading.  Let me know your thoughts – leave your comments below.

ViewYonder.com recently posted a great write up on some things that Cisco’s UCS can do that IBM, Dell or HP really can’t. You can go to ViewYonder.com to read the full article, but here are 10 things that Cisco’s UCS Polices do:

For more on this topic, visit Steve’s blog at ViewYonder.com.  Nice job, Steve!

I’ve recently posted some rumours about IBM’s upcoming announcements in their blade server line, now it is time to let you know some rumours I’m hearing about HP.   NOTE: this is purely speculation, I have no definitive information from HP so this may be false info.  That being said – here we go:

Rumour #1:  Integration of “CNA” like devices on the motherboard. 
As you may be aware, with the introduction of the “G6″, or Generation 6, of HP’s blade servers, HP added “FlexNICs” onto the servers’ motherboards instead of the 2 x 1Gb NICs that are standard on most of the competition’s blades.  FlexNICs allow for the user to carve up a 10Gb NIC into 4 virtual NICs when using the Flex-10 Modules inside the chassis.  (For a detailed description of Flex-10 technology, check out this HP video.)  The idea behind Flex-10 is that you have 10Gb connectivity that allows you to do more with fewer NICs. 

SO – what’s next?  Rumour has it that the “G7″ servers, expected to be announced on March 16, will have an integrated CNA or Converged Network Adapter.  With a CNA on the motherboard, both the ethernet and the fibre traffic will have a single integrated device to travel over.  This is a VERY cool idea because this announcement could lead to a blade server that can eliminate the additional daughter card or mezzanine expansion slots therefore freeing up valueable real estate for newer Intel CPU architecture.

Rumour #2: Next generation Flex-10 Modules will separate Fibre and Network traffic.

Today, HP’s Flex-10 ONLY allows handles Ethernet traffic.  There is no support for FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) so if you have a Fibre network, then you’ll also have to add a Fibre Switch into your BladeSystem chassis design. If HP does put in a CNA onto their next generation blade servers that carry Fibre and Ethernet traffic, wouldn’t it make sense there would need to be a module that would fit in the BladeSystem chassis that would allow for the storage and Ethernet traffic to exit? 

I’m hearing that a new version of the Flex-10 Module is coming, very soon, that will allow for the Ethernet AND the Fibre traffic to exit out the switch. (The image to the right shows what it could look like.)  The switch would allow for 4 of the uplink ports to go to the Ethernet fabric and the other 4 ports of the 8 port Next Generation Flex-10 switch to either be dedicated to a Fibre fabric OR used for additional 4 ports to the Ethernet fabric. 

If this rumour is accurate, it could shake up things in the blade server world.  Cisco UCS uses 10Gb Data Center Ethernet (Ethernet plus FCoE); IBM BladeCenter has the ability to do a 10Gb plus Fibre switch fabric (like HP) or it can use a 10Gb Enhanced Ethernet plus FCoE (like Cisco) however no one currently has a device to split the Ethernet and Fibre traffic at the blade chassis.  If this rumour is true, then we should see it announced around the same time as the G7 blade server (March 16).

That’s all for now.  As I come across more rumours, or information about new announcements, I’ll let you know.

Happy New Year to all of my readers. As we enter a new decade, I wanted to give everyone who takes the time to read a few stats on how I’ve done since my inaugural posting on September 23, 2009. First a bit of a background. My main website is now located at BladesMadeSimple.com, however a few months prior to that I had a blog on WordPress.com at http://kevinbladeguy.wordpress.com/.  Even though I have my own site, I have kept the WordPress.com site up as a mirror site primarily since Google has the site indexed and I get a lot of traffic from Google.  SO – how’d I do?  Well, here’s the breakdown:

On http://kevinbladeguy.wordpress.com, I received 4,588 page views since Sept 23, 2009 with my article on “Cisco UCS vs IBM BladeCenter H” receiving 399 page views.

On http://BladesMadeSimple.com, I received 2,041 page views which started up on November 1, 2009 with my article on Cisco UCS vs IBM BladeCenter H receiving 238 page views.

Combined, that is 6,629 page views since September 23, 2009!  As I’m still a virgin blogger, I’m not sure if that’s a good stat for a website devoted to talking about blade servers, but I’m happy with it.  I hope that you will stay with my as I continue my voyage on keeping you informed on blade servers.

Happy New Year!!