On March 8, Cisco launched the UCS B200 M3 blade server.   The half-height blade uses processors from Intel’s newly-announced Xeon E5 family, and competes with the Dell M620, HP BL460c Gen8, and IBM HS23 server blades.

The half-height UCS B200 M3 fits into the UCS 5100 series blade chassis.  It supports two Xeon E5-2600 “Sandy Bridge-EP” processors, and according to benchmark publications, this includes the 135-watt E5-2690. 

The blade contains 24 DIMM slots supporting 1333 and 1600 MT/s Registered DIMMs (RDIMMs), with maximum memory of 384 GB using 16GB DIMMs.  An embedded LSI 2004 SAS RAID controller connects to two hot-swap SFF drive bays, supporting SAS and SATA hard drives and SATA SSD options.

The B200 M3 differs from earlier UCS blades in that it includes a mezzanine expansion slot in addition to a modular LAN-on-Motherboard (mLOM) slot.  The only modular LOM offered is the new Cisco VIC 1240, a 4 x 10Gb, FCoE-capable VIC.   Options for the mezzanine slot include Cisco VICs, CNAs from Emulex and Qlogic, and a Broadcom NIC.  Alternatively, an I/O port expander card can be put into the mezzanine slot; this expander enables 4 additional 10Gb ports on the VIC1240 mLOM.   

The mLOM itself is actually optional; In addition to using a mLOM alongside a mezzanine card, the B200 M3 also supports configurations that only contain a mezzanine card.

Mezzanine Card Options for B200 M3

In addition to an internal USB port, the blade also includes two SDHC flash card sockets.  The flash cards intended for these slots are orderable, but won’t be enabled until the release of future firmware and software updates.  The 16GB “Flexible Flash” cards come preloaded with 4 virtual drives, which contain the Cisco Server Configuration Utility, the Cisco Host Upgrade Utility, the Cisco C-Series server drivers set, and a blank virtual drive on which you can install an OS or a hypervisor
Along with the blade, Cisco also announced the new 6296UP Fabric Interconnect.  The 2U interconnect contains 48 fixed ports which can be Ethernet, FCoE, or Fibre Channel, plus it contains slots for 3 expansion modules each of which can add 16 additional ports. There’s also a new FEX for the blade chassis, the 2204XP, with two 10Gb connections per half-height blade plus 4 uplink ports; like the earlier 2208XP it allows port-channeling instead of port-pinning to the fabric interconnect. 

Cisco also announced that in the second half of 2012 they would introduce multi-domain management capability for UCS.

Daniel Bowers is Vice President and Senior Analyst for Ideas International.  He possesses 19 years of IT industry experience in roles spanning server hardware and software engineering, product marketing, and server administration. His primary areas of expertise include blade servers, virtualization, and datacenter technologies.  This is Daniel’s first guest blog post for Blades Made Simple.  You can find out more about Daniel and Ideas International at http://www.ideasinternational.com/PDFs/Analyst-Biography-Daniel-Bowers.pdf

According to a recent event posting by Cisco, the 3rd generation of Cisco UCS blade servers will be revealed on March 6, 2012.  The server launch event advertises that Cisco will announce the B200 M3 blade server, and C220 M3, and C240 M3 rack servers on March 6th, 2012. These soon-to-be-announced servers are 2 socket servers built on Intel’s upcoming E5-2600 Romley processors and Patsburg chipsets.

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.    Kevin works for Dell as a Server Specialist covering the Global 500 East market.

Cisco announced on Jan. 26, 2012 a field replacement program for Cisco UCS B440 Blade Servers.  Cisco Field Notice FN – 63430 describes the problem as a failure of a MOSFET, or Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor, power transistor on the blade server that can cause the component to overheat and emit a short flash which could lead to complete board failure.  According to Cisco.com, Cisco is directly contacting UCS B440 Blade Server customers and will replace UCS B440 Blade Servers currently deployed at customer sites.  Cisco is making UCS B440 Blade Server hardware modifications, and a hardware replacement program has been launched.

To identify the affected systems and any available workaround, please visit the Cisco Field Notice at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/ts/fn/634/fn63430.html

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.    Kevin works for Dell as a Server Specialist covering the Global 500 East market.

May 24, 2011  - IDC came out with their 1Q 2011 worldwide server market revenue report today showing that Cisco has finally entered the market standings with a 3rd place standing at 9.4% factory revenue share .  IDC’s findings also showed that both HP and IBM decreased their blade server market share from Q4 2010.

According to IDC, worldwide server sales (all servers, not just blade servers) for 1Q 2011 increased 12.1 % year over year to $11.9 billion in factory revenues. IDC also reported the blade server market accelerated and continued its strong growth in 1Q with revenue increasing 23.8% year over year with shipments increasing to 5.4% compared to 1Q 2010.  Overall, blade servers represent 15.2% of the quarterly worldwide server revenues.  Interestingly enough, 90% of all blade revenue is driven by x86 systems, a segment in which blades now represent 20.5% of all x86 server revenue.

Here’s a summary of the top 4 blade server market share (based on factory revenue share):

#1 market share: HP decreased their market share from 53.4% in Q4 2010 to 50.0% in Q1 2011

#2 market share: IBM decreased their market share from 28.1% in Q4 2010 to 20.2% in Q1 2011.

#3 market share: Cisco at 9.4% in Q1 2011

#4 market share: Dell at 8.2% in Q1 2011

HP maintains the #1 market share spot now holding an impressive 50% of all blade server factory revenue market share.  An interesting observation, though, is that both HP and IBM have fallen over the past 12 months when compared to Q1 2010.  As you can see in the chart, HP dropped 6.2% market share and IBM fell 3.4% market share year-over-year.  Is this contributed to Cisco’s entry into the market place? 

According to Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC, “After several years of being a highly consolidated market where the top 3 vendor accounted for over 80% of blade revenue, the recent entry of Cisco has introduced a viable new competitor to the market.”  While the quantities of Cisco UCS customers were not mentioned into the IDC report, according to Cisco’s Omar Sultan’s blog (http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/they-were-wrong-about-ucs-what-else-are-they-wrong-about/) , there are 3,820 customers as of Cisco’s 2nd Fiscal Quarter 2011.

For a full summary of the IDC Quarterly Server Tracker report, visit my other blog at:
http://corus360.com/company/blog/idc-shows-hp-as-the-server-leader-for-q1-2011

A reader recently commented on my article about HP’s new 32GB DIMM, “At $8039 per DIMM, HP can support 384GB in a BL460c at the cost of $96,000 per server just for the memory! If you filled just one rack with these servers, you would spend $6 million just for the memory. And the memory would run at a paltry 800MHz.
Cisco can stuff 384GB of RAM into a B250 blade for almost one fifth the cost using 8GB DIMMs… and run that memory bus at 1333MHz. I realize the Cisco B250 is twice as big as the HP BL460c, but when you’re saving $75,000+ in memory on EVERY SERVER and getting better performance out of that memory, you can afford to buy an extra slot in a blade chassis.”  This reader brought up some good points, so in today’s article, figured I’d dig into this a little.

First, let’s examine the maximums (per 42U rack):

The table above shows that the HP BL460G7 with 32GB DIMMs offers a higher server density, more CPUs and cores as well as memory over the Cisco B250 M2.  As the reader commented in the opening above, the Cisco UCS B250 M2 offering is much cheaper but is half of the max memory of the HP 32GB DIMM offering.  Based on the differences in the table, I’m not sure comparing the Cisco UCS B250 M2 with the HP BL460 G7 with 32GB DIMMs is a fair comparison.  Perhaps a better comparison would be to look at the HP BL460 G7 using 16GB DIMMs per 42U rack: 

The full-width form factor of the Cisco B250 M2 limits the quantity of servers you can into a 42U rack, which affects the overall maximums when compared to the HP BL460 G7 using 16GB DIMMs.  Of course, at $3619 (U.S. List) each, the 16GB DIMMs aren’t cheap either.    In fact, a fully loaded BL460 G7 would cost $43,428 in memory alone – which equals $2,779,392 per 42U rack.  Keep in mind, this is memory costs alone.  The chassis, servers, etc would require a lot more.

If you are trying to get the maximum amount of RAM in a 42U rack, without breaking the bank, check out the maximums using HP’s 2x220c G7 blade servers in a 42U rack:

The 16GB DIMMs used in the HP BL2x220c are $999 (U.S. List) so that makes a maxed out BL2x220c G7 node cost $5,994.  Multiplied out for the 128 server nodes you can get in a 42U rack, the HP BL2x220c G7 would cost $767,232 for all of the memory in a 42U rack.  How this compares, in price, to the Cisco UCS B250 M2, I don’t know – Cisco doesn’t have a method of looking up list prices.   

The reality is that it is very unlikely that someone will fill up a rack full of servers with maximum memory, much less large memory DIMM sizes like 32GB.  If there was a sole need for maximum RAM per 42U, there are better ways to achieve than using large memory DIMM sizes, as shown in the examples above. Yes, in the examples above, I used HP but they aren’t necessarily the leaders of max memory per rack.  The other blade server vendors also have large memory solutions.  Dell’s PowerEdge M710HD server (http://bladesmadesimple.com/2010/06/dell-announces-new-blade-servers-m710hd-and-m610x/) can offer 12.28TB of maximum memory in a rack.  IBM’s HX5 (http://bladesmadesimple.com/2010/03/announcing-the-ibm-bladecenter-hx5-blade-server-with-detailed-pics/) that has memory scalability to large amounts of memory per rack using the MAX5. 

I have to give Cisco credit.  The way they get 384GB RAM is very impressive.  The B250 blade architecture takes 4 x 8GB DIMMs and presents it to the system as a single 32GB DIMM.  Check out this post here on details on how that works:
http://bladesmadesimple.com/2010/01/384gb-ram-in-a-single-blade-server-how-ciscos-making-it-happen/.  I will be curious to know if there are plans for Cisco to create the ability to run 768GB on the B250 M2 with 16GB DIMMs.

Conclusion
Yes, the $8k per 32GB DIMM is hefty.  I don’t know of a lot of users who are buying 16GB DIMMs because the price tag is too large.  The best thing that the 32GB DIMM may bring to the market as Dell, IBM and even Cisco begin selling it is that it will drive down the cost of the 16GB DIMMs making the 8GB DIMMs become “the standard” and possibly eliminate the 4GB DIMMs.

A recent article by SearchDataCenter.com titled Top Ten Data Center Trends of 2011, predicts that Cisco UCS blade servers will grab mega market share and inspires more converged infrastructure products.

According to the SearchDataCenter.com article, “These [Cisco] machines can put up impressive performance numbers, and make vendor management simpler, but analysts and IT managers remain wary of vendor lock-in. Cisco has the most to gain in this new market for converged hardware platforms, with installations in nearly every data center around the world.” 

It is interesting to see outside sources waging on the success of Cisco’s UCS platform.  I’ve followed the Cisco UCS offering since the beginning – even before some Cisco field reps knew about it.  Up until recently I have considered the Cisco UCS platform as ideal for virtualization where 8 or more ESX / vSphere hosts are needed.  Why?  The platform appears to be designed for large scale growth – something most SMB (small medium business) data centers don’t need.  However a recent meeting with M. Sean McGee (http://www.mseanmcgee.com/) helped me see that UCS could be a good fit for the SMB market.  If Cisco wants to be in “nearly every data center around the world” as the SearchDataCenter.com article states, Cisco is going to need to find a way to reach beyond their Enterprise customers to the SMB market.  Everyone knows the brand “CISCO” but how many non-Enterprise customers knows the brand “UCS”?

I hope that Cisco does increase their market share.  They have a really unique product offering and I think their design could bring a lot to the blade server market in the upcoming years.  Good luck, Cisco.  Let the race begin!

For details on Cisco’s UCS offering, visit http://bladesmadesimple.com/cisco/

For the full SearchDataCenter.com article, please visit: http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/2240030708/Top-ten-data-center-trends-of-2011

As I’m sure most of you already know, Cisco has released an anticipated update to the firmware for UCS.  Of the dozens of enhancements that were added or modified, perhaps one of the most interesting is Cisco’s integration of their rack-based “C-Series” line into the UCS Platform.  This provides users with a single interface to manage both their rack and their blade server platforms.  Instead of re-creating the wheel, I encourage you take a few minutes to read up on all the goodness from M. Sean McGee’s site at http://www.mseanmcgee.com/2010/12/cisco%e2%80%99s-stocking-stuffer-for-ucs-customers-firmware-release-1-41/

I recently received a comment  on my previous post concerning Cisco’s market share (“What’s the Truth About Cisco’s Market Share“) which has me more confused.  The comment admits that Cisco has not released any market share data to IDC, but that when you look at the Cisco Q1 2010 Earnings Call and compare it to IDC’s findings of the overall industry you should be able to derive conclusions from there.  That’s where it gets confusing.

First look at IDC.  As I reported in May (“IDC Q1 2010 Report: Blade Servers Growing, With #1 Market Share Going To…“), IDC reported that Q1 2010 revenue for all blade servers,  including x86, EPIC, and RISC blades, accounted for $1.4 billion in revenues.

Next, we review the Call Transcript from the Cisco Q1 2010 Earnings Call (http://www.morningstar.com/earnings/19007502-cisco-systems-inc-csco-q1-2011.aspx?pindex=4) and we see that Cisco reports, “Our UCS server product family had another extremely strong quarter with growth year-over-year of 550% to an annualized run rate of almost $500 million.”

So, IDC reports there were $1.4 billion blade servers sold worldwide in Q1 2010 and Cisco reports they had a Year-over-Year growth of 550% to an annualized run rate of $500 million. 

Since we don’t know how 2010 is going to end up, we would need to do some estimation to play out this scenario.  We could estimate that all blade servers sales in 2010 will equal close to $5.6 billion ($1.4 x 4 quarters).  If so, in order to figure out what percentage Cisco would own, we would have to add their $500 million to the $5.6 billion estimated, so the adjusted 2010 blade server revenue would be $6.1 billlion.  If Cisco’s annual blade (UCS) share was $500 million, that would mean Cisco owned 12.2% of the overall revenue share.  Based on the Q1 numbers that IDC reported, if HP had 56.2% share and IBM had 23.6%, that leaves 20.2% to divide up between Dell, Cisco, Fujitsu, Oracle and all other blade server vendors.  Could Cisco own the #3 revenue spot with 12.2% revenue share?  Possibly, but that would leave Dell to have less than 8% market share. 

All of this speculation is based on the Q1 2010 Cisco statement that they have an annualized run rate of $500 million in UCS.  If we look at comments left on my post about the Q2 2010 IDC numbers (“REVISED HP Loses Blade Market Share in Q2“) we find a comment from Jed Scaramella, research manager, Enterprise Servers at IDC who comments that “Dell owns 11.8% unit share in x86 blades.”  Let’s revise my math based on what IDC reports for Q2 2010:

Dell: 11.8% market share
IBM: 24.2% market share
HP: 55.8% market share

Total IDC reported market share for Q2 2010: 91.8% which leaves 8.2% market share for Cisco and all others.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m NOT saying that Cisco is misreporting their UCS numbers, but the numbers don’t appear to line up.  Perhaps Cisco is including their C-Series rack server line.  Perhaps the difference lies in the fact that Cisco is using year-over-year data and I’m using projected 2010 revenue numbers from IDC.  I just don’t know.  I’m confused and hope that Cisco and IDC can figure out something, because I’d REALLY like to know where Cisco stands in the market compared to HP, IBM and Dell. Знакомства

Cisco, your move.

It’s always fun to take a look at the past, so today I wanted to revisit my very first blog post.  Titled, “Cisco UCS vs IBM BladeCenter H”, I focused on trying to compare Cisco’s blade technology with IBM’s.  Was I successful or not – it’s up to you to decide.  This article ranks at #7 in all-time hits, so people are definitely interested.  Keep in mind this post has not been updated to reflect any changes in offering or technologies, it’s just being offered as a look back in time for your amusement.  Here’s how the blog post began:

News Flash: Cisco is now selling servers!

Okay – perhaps this isn’t news anymore, but the reality is Cisco has been getting a lot of press lately – from their overwhelming presence at VMworld 2009 to their ongoing cat fight with HP.  Since I work for a Solutions Provider that sells HP, IBM and now Cisco blade servers, I figured it might be good to “try” and put together a comparison between the Cisco and IBM.  

Read the original blog>>

My friend, M. Sean McGee, wrote up a great blog post in April that deserves revisiting titled, “The State of Statelessness: Cisco UCS vs. HP Virtual Connect“.  In the write-up, he discusses Cisco how Unified Computing System (UCS) blade servers are “stateless” and use “UCS Service Profiles”.  He identifies 96 server settings that can be handled via the UCS Service Profile vs 12 server settings with HP’s Virtual Connect Server Profile.  It is a great read, so I encourage you to take a few minutes and see if you agree with what he writes.