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

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.

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.

What is Cisco’s blade server market share?  That seems to be the mystery question that no one can really answer.  The previous IDC quarterly worldwide server report mentioned nothing about Cisco, yet readers and bloggers alike claim Cisco is #3, so what IS the true answer? 

I was fortunate enough to have some communication recently with Jed Scaramella, Research Manager, Enterprise Servers for IDC about this topic.  I asked Jed if Cisco is reporting any sort of data in regards to the revenue or units of the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and he replied,

“Cisco has not officially begun to report server sales to IDC (or Gartner I’m told).  They have used IDC as “baseline data” in Chambers’s statements claiming the #3 position; we’ve yet to review the details to the claims, so it’s not clear what Cisco is counting and how it relates to IDC’s taxomony of server sales. (i.e., are there including software in UCS sales, which IDC doesn’t).   We expect to report Cisco server sales in the next few quarters, after the figures have been vetted and accurately equate to IBM and HP’s business.“ 

While it does not appear that Cisco is reporting any sales data yet I see on a Cisco blog that on Sept 15, 2010, John Chambers, Cisco CEO, mentioned in a Cisco Financial Analyst Press Conference that a) ”UCS has already taken the #3 market share spot in US/Canada for x86 blade servers” and b) ”Cisco expects UCS to be 50% the market share of the #2 competitor for the worldwide x86 blade server market within the next 2 quarters.” 

Now I’m confused.  I can’t find any data to support Mr. Chambers’ comments, and for Cisco to not even be on the IDC list of worldwide blade server market vendors, it’s a pretty bold statement to say they are going to be in 2nd place (where IBM is at 24.2% as of Q2 2010.)

Can ANYONE point me to some supporting data that shows that Cisco is taking over the blade server market, because I sure can’t.

I’ve been getting some questions via email and I’ve seen some questions being asked in my LinkedIn group, “Blade Server Technologies” so I thought I’d take a few minutes in today’s post to answer these questions, as well as get your feedback.  Feel free to post your thoughts on these questions in the comments below.

“Hi All,   this questions comes from a complete blade-server-dummy, so please don’t mind if my questions are just stupid.   Our customer has some space issues with their server rooms and want to swap their racks and servers with blade servers as much as they can. Naturally they also ask if our apps can run on blade servers.   Do blade servers can handle high transaction capasities? Are they good for non-virtual systems?   ”

Okay, this question was loaded with more than one question, so first I’ll focus on the primary question – “can blade servers run apps that aren’t virtualized”?    In a short answer, YES, absolutely with some caveats.  Blade servers were first designed in the early 2000′s before virtualization was hot in the x86 space.  Blade servers have the same technology as in your rack servers – CPUs, memory, NICs, drives, etc.  The biggest difference is that blade servers share their environment.  They share the power, the cooling, the management, and the I/O connectivity.   In some cases, blade servers are very similar to 1u rack servers, so what you can do with a 1U server, you may be able to do with a blade servers.  That being said, contrary to some vendors’ marketing, blade servers are not meant for everyworkload.  If you have an application that requires more than 2 local drives, or more than 3 PCIe expansion slots, then blade servers may not be suitable.  YES, there are ways to provide a blade server more than 2 local drives (like using IBM’s BladeCenter S chassis with local drives) or provide blade servers with more than 3 PCIe expansion slots (like the Dell PowerEdge M910) but these are exceptions to the rule.

 ”Who rules the blade server world? IBM? Dell? HP? Cisco?”

This is a good question that is difficult to answer.  When you look at the market share from IDC, you see that HP leads the pack with IBM following second and Dell being grouped in with the others.  While Cisco is creating disruption in the market, they are still too new to be added to any analyst charts.  My answer, based on the IDC data, would have to be HP.

 I am a fan of your website and I have been following up some of  your reviews on blades servers and it looks like you have been around blade severs for awhile. I was wondering if you can help me in making a tough decision . We have been loyal to Dell for 10 years (rack mount servers).  We have been able to get the servers we have from Dell …  Today we run vSphere 4 Enterprise plus on 6 R900 attached to a CX4-240 and a Celerra NS40. Our telecom team bought a new Cisco UCS system because they have to upgrade their old HP/Cisco Server running our telephony system and Cisco did not give them much choice.  We bought two chassis and 4 blades, the rest is empty.  My question is…  should we start moving towards Cisco UCS or continue doing business with Dell and get into there Blade servers? I am concerned, because in the past Cisco has given us good prices and then become one of our most expensive solution in our datacenter. Any advice will be highly appreciate it!!

This question came to me via email.  I will have to admit, I have been around blades since around 2005, but I’m not an expert by any means.  This web site is designed to help simplify the complexity of blade servers, and to be a single point of information.  I try to stay as “neutral” as possible with my posts and comments, so when I get questions like this, I hesitate to provide a definitive answer – especially when it comes to talking about Cisco UCS.  Cisco has probably the most devoted followers / employees of any manufacturer I have ever dealt with and I KNOW that anything negative that is said about Cisco will cause a mass amount of comments to come flowing to my inbox by a certain couple of Cisco fanatics (wipe the Kool-Aid off your mouth.)  With that being said, my thoughts on Cisco UCS is simple – it is a great design for an environment needing more than 8 VMware vSphere hosts.  In my opinion, anything less and Cisco UCS is over kill.  My reasoning for this is because the architecture of Cisco’s UCS is built in a modular approach with each module (think of a Lego block) hosting up to 8 blade servers per chassis, with each blade chassis connecting to a single management device (the UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnect.)  If you want more detail on the Cisco UCS offering, check out this post from a few weeks ago. 

I stumbled upon your blog whilst researching an issue with the setup of I/O module bays 3 and 4.  In the past I’ve only ever used bays 1 and 2 on all of my BladeCenters.  Now we’re starting to virtualize and the need for more than two NICs per blade server has finally forced our hand.  I’ve installed the IBM/Cisco 3012 ethernet switch modules and everything looks like it should work, but I can’t ping the switch address.  I have 3012s in other BladeCenters setup the same way, the only difference is that they are all in bays 1 and 2.  Is there some trick in IBM Bladecenter world to setting up modules in bays 3 and 4?

While I would love to be a one-stop shop for technical issues, my recommendation would be to take a look at the IBM Redbook titled, IBM BladeCenter Products and Technology.    You can find this under my Helpful Links tab above.  One bit of advice that I’ve run into in the past with my own IBM BladeCenter chassis -  under Advanced Management of the I/O Module in the IBM Advanced Management Module (AMM), make sure External management over all ports is “ENABLED”.  That may help.  If not, I reocmmend you look at purchasing Remote Technical Support (RTS) on one of your blade servers from your IBM business partner. This provides “how-to” support from IBM on your blade server and your chassis and integrated switches.  (If you don’t have an IBM Business Partner, contact me and I’ll hook you up.)

That’s it for this blog post.  If you have questions about blade servers, e-mail me at BladesMadeSimple@gmail.com and I’ll see if I can help you out.