Every other manufacture scales on a Chassis Basis (16 or 14 Servers) We scale on a datacenter or Mega Chassis 320 Server Basis. If you want to incorporate the 321st server then most likely your existing tools already have plug ins to make them ‘UCS Aware’ and they can scale across multiple UCS PODS. Cisco’s approach is about Choice.

Here is a ‘Challenge’ go setup UCS System. Outside of giving the Mangers IP addresses out of the box you can control everything else directly from BMC BladeLogic or Ionix or Tivoli or SCOM. Cisco Is not in the OS provisioning business. Cisco is not in the orchestration business.The value add of UCS is to allow UCS Manager XML API to provide the ‘Missing Link’ between existing customer management stacks and the internal cloud.

Cisco UCS customer can do more WITH THEIR EXISTING MANAGEMENT TOOLS by using UCS.

I really encourage you to setup a UCS because it really is something you appreciate once you do. If not that is just as well, I really like all the FUD that is thrown at UCS because it is so off base it really helps us out. Also glad to see Dell saved scalent from bankruptcy and look forward to competing with dell for customers compute business.

The other thing that I really don’t understand is how people can argue with the innovation of UCS. The simplicity is very simple to prove and I would challenge all of you that work for DELL HP and IBM as well as the customers like myself that have the ability to do the following:

Use a single Disk Array, attached to your SAN switch of choice (Yes you can run multi vendor environments with UCS – a shocker to the FUD writers I know …. )

Build 4 Dell Chassis
Build 4 HP Chassis
Build 4 IBM Chassis
Build 8 Cisco UCS Chassis

Now just compare the time it took you to configure each of those Chassis (yes just the chassis). If you want to just blow your mind install some SLES servers, some Windows 2008 Servers (again a shocker to the FUD writers but YES you can install Linux, Windows and just about any OS on UCS, IT IS COMMODITY HARDWARE PEOPLE) and see how quickly those are up and able to communicate to everything else in the Data Center or LAB or whatever you want.

Could you please post the link for where you got the icon for the UCS 6100-A labelled in this article. I have searched through the visio icon library and cannot find the exact icon. Are these made in visio? thx

The service profiles also look like huge time savers (once configured)…

And to Sris point on management..I do believe that UCS can integrate into BMC, Tivoli, Openview, and System Center…but I just started looking at UCS as a replacement for an HP infrastructure a few days ago…so I could very well be mistaken.

Looks like you totally forgot the data center reality! That they have existing infrastructure and management tools. That they have Dell servers (or other vendor servers, really sorry to say no Cisco servers!)… and relevant management tools in place. That they have trusted their business with all these years. So get this man, to your surprise! The reality is by adding UCS, they are adding more management points, even if it is just one

So you need to get real first, and understand that with the management infrastructure that is already inplace in every data centers with Dell Servers, it is just adding Server HW. That is one step…pretty simple and provides one major thing customer really cares “Investment Protection”. In addition, ease of deployment, etc, etc….

So, don’t you agree, in fact with UCS you are just adding more complexity to existing data centers, instead of simplifying..Now customer has to worry about managing two different server platforms…

I will definitely agree that you have some value proposition, if in case you build ground up new data centers where that companies just started up…otherwise it’s just “Nuke and Pave” proposition…and I bet customer don’t agree with it…even if Cisco is giving away to UCS chassis free..

Don’t make me post this to my blog, by not posting it to yours Be fair…can u?
Cheers
Sri

What happens if a company needs more than 320 physical server, say 321 do they have to run another instance of UCSM and manage that separately…

Let’s say in the case of HP or Dell a blade chassis holds 16 servers. So for 320 servers that would be 20 chassis. Each of the 20 chassis has Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and iLO management, so that’s 3 points of management per chassis. 20 chassis with 3 points of management is 60 management points for 320 servers.

With Cisco UCS there is no individual per chassis management points, you only need to manage the single Fabric Interconnect. Furthermore, the Ethernet, FC, and iLO is all managed in a single pane of glass … 1 management point. So for 320 servers thats 1 point of management in Cisco UCS, and 60 points of management for HP/IBM/Dell.

Ok, 321 servers? That would be 2 points of management in Cisco UCS, and 63 for HP/IBM/Dell.

Why stop at 321? How about 640 servers? 2 points of management in Cisco UCS, 120 with HP or DELL.

You get the idea.

Cheers,
Brad

Thanks for joining the conversation. You said:

… we’ll ignore the fact that the only thing you can run at the moment is virtualised workloads (and only in VMware)

Well, I won’t ignore the fact that you need to do your homework on Cisco UCS because you are dead wrong here. Our customers can run VMware, Citrix, Hyper-V, Windows, Solaris x86, and Linux workloads on UCS.

the problem is not as simple as “how many IP’s are consumed”

If you think the management capabilities of UCS are simply reducing the IP addresses to keep track of, again, you need to do some homework. You mentioned turning up new services quickly, lets work with that scenario…

Here’s one simple example of many: Imagine a new application to be deployed that requires a new VLAN and Firmware update pushed to all of the adapters on the perhaps hundreds of servers that will be supporting that application. The Cisco UCS customer simply logs into the Fabric Interconnect and with a few clicks of the mouse updates a single Service Profile template with the new VLAN settings and Firmware bundle. -DONE- The system goes out to the hundreds of servers driven by that template and updates the Firmware and VLAN settings. Now that’s time to market.

This time it was VLANs and Firmware, the next time it might be QoS or BIOS settings. A process that would otherwise take weeks, several different management platforms, and team of people is all done in a few minutes after a few clicks of the mouse. All of this with the out-of-the-box capabilities in UCS Manager. This process can also be driven via the XML API integration with 3rd party automation players such as BMC BladeLogic or EMC Ionix, for example.

I could go on with 10 other similar examples, but you get the idea, right?

Do you still think UCS is just solving “pain points” only in the network?

Cheers,
Brad