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. Continue reading
Category Archives: Cisco
A Post from the Archive: “Cisco UCS vs IBM BladeCenter H”
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: Continue reading
What is the Truth About Cisco’s Blade Server Market Share?
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? Continue reading
Blade Server Q&A
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. Continue reading
Cisco Announces 32 DIMM, 2 Socket Nehalem EX UCS B230-M1 Blade Server
Thanks to fellow blogger, M. Sean McGee (http://www.mseanmcgee.com/) I was alerted to the fact that Cisco announced on today, Sept. 14, their 13th blade server to the UCS family – the Cisco UCS B230 M1.
This newest addition performs a few tricks that no other vendor has been able to perform. Continue reading
(UPDATED) The Best Blade Server Option Is…[Part 1 – A Look at Cisco]
Updated on 9/13/2010 with link to Sean McGee’s I/O Card Blog Post
One of the questions I get the most is, “which blade server option is best for me?” My honest answer is always, “it depends.” The reality is that the best blade infrastructure for YOU is really going to depend on what is important to you. Based on this, I figured it would be a good exercise to do a high level comparison of the blade chassis offerings from Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM. If you ready through my past blog posts, you’ll see that my goal is to be as unbiased as possible when it comes to talking about blade servers. I’m going to attempt to be “vendor neutral” with this post as well, but I welcome your comments, thoughts and criticisms. Continue reading
(UPDATED) Best Blade Server for VMware Is…
(Updated to include links to results)
I’ve had a few questions lately about “the best” blade server to use for virtualization – specifically VMware virtualization. While the obvious answer is “it depends”, I thought it would be an interesting approach to identify the blade servers that ranked in the top 5 in VMware’s VMmark benchmark. Before I begin, let me explain what the VMmark testing is about. Continue reading
Rumour? New 8 Port Cisco Fabric Extender for UCS
I recently heard a rumour that Cisco was coming out with an 8 port Fabric Extender (FEX) for the UCS 5108, so I thought I’d take some time to see what this would look like. NOTE: this is purely speculation, I have no definitive information from Cisco so this may be false info.
Before we discuss the 8 port FEX, let’s take a look at the 4 port UCS 2140XP FEX and how the blade servers connect, or “pin” to them. The diagram below shows a single FEX. A single UCS 2140XP FEX has 4 x 10Gb uplinks to the 6100 Fabric Interconnect Module. The UCS 5108 chassis has 2 FEX per chassis, so each server would have a 10Gb connection per FEX. However, as you can see, the server shares that 10Gb connection with another blade server. I’m not an I/O guy, so I can’t say whether or not having 2 servers connect to the same 10Gb uplink port would cause problems, but simple logic would tell me that two items competing for the same resource “could” cause contention. If you decide to only connect 2 of the 4 external FEX ports, then you have all of the “odd #” blade servers connecting to port 1 and all of the “even # blades” connecting to port 2. Now you are looking at a 4 servers contending for 1 uplink port. Of course, if you only connect 1 external uplink, then you are looking at all 8 servers using 1 uplink port.
Introducing the 8 Port Fabric Extender (FEX)
I’ve looked around and can’t confirm if this product is really coming or not, but I’ve heard a rumour that there is going to be an 8 port version of the UCS 2100 series Fabric Extender. I’d imagine it would be the UCS 2180XP Fabric Extender and the diagram below shows what I picture it would look like.
The biggest advantage I see of this design would be that each server would have a dedicated uplink port to the Fabric Interconnect. That being said, if the existing 20 and 40 port Fabric Interconnects remain, this 8 port FEX design would quickly eat up the available ports on the Fabric Interconnect switches since the FEX ports directly connect to the Fabric Interconnect ports. So – does this mean there is also a larger 6100 series Fabric Interconnect on the way? I don’t know, but it definitely seems possible.
What do you think of this rumoured new offering? Does having a 1:1 blade server to uplink port matter or is this just more
New Cisco Blade Server: B440-M1
Cisco recently announced their first blade offering with the Intel Xeon 7500 processor, known as the “Cisco UCS B440-M1 High-Performance Blade Server.” This new blade is a full-width blade that offers 2 – 4 Xeon 7500 processors and 32 memory slots, for up to 256GB RAM, as well as 4 hot-swap drive bays. Since the server is a full-width blade, it will have the capability to handle 2 dual-port mezzanine cards for up to 40 Gbps I/O per blade.
Each Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis can house up to four B440 M1 servers (maximum 160 per Unified Computing System).
How Does It Compare to the Competition?
Since I like to talk about all of the major blade server vendors, I thought I’d take a look at how the new Cisco B440 M1 compares to IBM and Dell. (HP has not yet announced their Intel Xeon 7500 offering.)
Processor Offering
Both Cisco and Dell offer models with 2 – 4 Xeon 7500 CPUs as standard. They each have variations on speeds – Dell has 9 processor speed offerings; Cisco hasn’t released their speeds and IBM’s BladeCenter HX5 blade server will have 5 processor speed offerings initially. With all 3 vendors’ blades, however, IBM’s blade server is the only one that is designed to scale from 2 CPUs to 4 CPUs by connecting 2 x HX5 blade servers. Along with this comes their “FlexNode” technology that enables users to have the 4 processor blade system to split back into 2 x 2 processor systems at specific points during the day. Although not announced, and purely my speculation, IBM’s design also leads to a possible future capability of connecting 4 x 2 processor HX5’s for an 8-way design. Since each of the vendors offer up to 4 x Xeon 7500’s, I’m going to give the advantage in this category to IBM. WINNER: IBM
Memory Capacity
Both IBM and Cisco are offering 32 DIMM slots with their blade solutions, however they are not certifying the use of 16GB DIMMs – only 4GB and 8GB DIMMs, therefore their offering only scales to 256GB of RAM. Dell claims to offers 512GB DIMM capacity on their the PowerEdge 11G M910 blade server, however that is using 16GB DIMMs. REalistically, I think the M910 would only be used with 8GB DIMMs, so Dell’s design would equal IBM and Cisco’s. I’m not sure who has the money to buy 16GB DIMMs, but if they do – WINNER: Dell (or a TIE)
Server Density
As previously mentioned, Cisco’s B440-M1 blade server is a “full-width” blade so 4 will fit into a 6U high UCS5100 chassis. Theoretically, you could fit 7 x UCS5100 blade chassis into a rack, which would equal a total of 28 x B440-M1’s per 42U rack.Overall, Cisco’s new offering is a nice addition to their existing blade portfolio. While IBM has some interesting innovation in CPU scalability and Dell appears to have the overall advantage from a server density, Cisco leads the management front.
Dell’s PowerEdge 11G M910 blade server is a “full-height” blade, so 8 will fit into a 10u high M1000e chassis. This means that 4 x M1000e chassis would fit into a 42u rack, so 32 x Dell PowerEdge M910 blade servers should fit into a 42u rack.
IBM’s BladeCenter HX5 blade server is a single slot blade server, however to make it a 4 processor blade, it would take up 2 server slots. The BladeCenter H has 14 server slots, so that makes the IBM solution capable of holding 7 x 4 processor HX5 blade servers per chassis. Since the chassis is a 9u high chassis, you can only fit 4 into a 42u rack, therefore you would be able to fit a total of 28 IBM HX5 (4 processor) servers into a 42u rack.
WINNER: Dell
Management
The final category I’ll look at is the management. Both Dell and IBM have management controllers built into their chassis, so management of a lot of chassis as described above in the maximum server / rack scenarios could add some additional burden. Cisco’s design, however, allows for the management to be performed through the UCS 6100 Fabric Interconnect modules. In fact, up to 40 chassis could be managed by 1 pair of 6100’s. There are additional features this design offers, but for the sake of this discussion, I’m calling WINNER: Cisco.
Cisco’s UCS B440 M1 is expected to ship in the June time frame. Pricing is not yet available. For more information, please visit Cisco’s UCS web site at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10921/index.html.
IBM BladeCenter H vs Cisco UCS
(From the Archives – September 2009)
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. Why IBM? Simply because at this time, they are the only blade vendor who offers a Converged Network Adapter (CNA) that will work with the Cisco Nexus 5000 line. At this time Dell and HP do not offer a CNA for their blade server line so IBM is the closest we can come to Cisco’s offering. I don’t plan on spending time educating you on blades, because if you are interested in this topic, you’ve probably already done your homework. My goal with this post is to show the pros (+) and cons (-) that each vendor has with their blade offering – based on my personal, neutral observation
Chassis Variety / Choice: winner in this category is IBM.
IBM currently offers 5 types of blade chassis: BladeCenter S, BladeCenter E, BladeCenter H, BladeCenter T and BladeCenter HT. Each of the IBM blade chassis have unique offerings, such as the BladeCenter S is designed for small or remote offices with local storage capabilities, whereas the BladeCenter HT is designed for Telco environments with options for NEBS compliant features including DC power. At this time, Cisco only offers a single blade chassis offering (the 5808).
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:
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IBM BladeCenter H Chassis
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10Gb Pass-Thru Module
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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.
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