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.Offering 32 DIMM slots, 2 x Intel Nehalem EX (Xeon 6500 or Xeon 7500 Series CPU) and 2 x hot-swap drives, all within a half-width form factor. Very impressive offering although I have to admit, I’m a little ticked off that I didn’t know about this from the Cisco team ahead of time. If I had, I might have held off my previous blog post (https://bladesmadesimple.com/2010/08/the-best-blade-server-option-is-part1/) Now I have to go back and update that too…
Anyway, Sean does a nice job comparing the soon to be released HP BL620c G7, the IBM HX5 + MAX 5 and the Dell PowerEdge M910 blade servers (see below), so I encourage you to go visit his blog post and read up on what’s new. Here’s the post:
http://www.mseanmcgee.com/2010/09/the-cisco-ucs-b230-the-goldilocks-blade-server/
Nice job, Sean. Thanks for the solid write up.
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what will be HP response ?
I don’t expect for #HP to have a “response” to the #Cisco UCS B230 M1. They already announced (and will soon ship) the BL620c G7 which offers rival specs. If you look at the max memory in the chart Sean put together above, you’ll see that Cisco’s offering allows for 8GB DIMMs whereas HP’s offers 16GB DIMMs. This means that theoretically, one could fit 16,384GB of RAM into a 42u rack with an HP BL620c G7 offering versus 14,336GB of RAM with a Cisco UCS B230 M1 offering. However, the reality of someone using the expensive 16GB DIMMS is not realistic. On the other hand, with the ability to fit up to 56 UCS B230’s into a 42u rack, Cisco’s offering provides up to 1792 CPU cores into a single rack, vs 1024 CPU cores with a rack full of HP BL620c G7’s. So – long story long, HP has an offering with the HP BL620c G7, which has advantages and disadvantages over Cisco’s new UCS B230 M1 offering. Hmm. Perhaps I should write a post on this… As always, thanks for the comment!
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“The company will eventually support 16 GB memory sticks, and that will double up the memory in the B230-M2 to 512 GB.”
http://bit.ly/bJgJ2s
Hey Kevin,
Thanks for the post and blog referral, bro. Sorry we snuck this one in on you. We’ll do our best to not let that happen again.
Keep up the great bloggin’!
-sean
I would expect HP to point out the I/O side of things though. Depending on the real world scenario then I/O may or may not be an issue, likewise actually filling a rack with that many cores. However if picking specifications I think it is fairer to include the balance from all vendors. HP can claim a massive amount more bandwidth on the BL620 and will claim it is a more balanced blade. Again both depend on the usage scenario but cherry picking specifications doesn’t doe either vendor justice.
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