Blogger Trained by Cisco Reveals UCS Facts

Scott Lowe, self-described in his blog as a technical lead specializing in virtualization and virtualization technologies for a national VAR/reseller, has been attending Cisco UCS training this week in San Jose. Scott's recent postings reveal some of the significant differences and deficiencies between Cisco marketing and actual product capabilities that exists.

Unfortunately, the story of Scott's blog was picked up and published by a major periodical, and as a result I don't expect additional candid commentary to appear throughout the rest of the training class, but what we have learned so far is important to anyone interested in the facts (all exerpts from Scott's blogs):

1. Cisco's half-width blades don’t use Cisco’s advanced memory technologies and, therefore, will suffer from the same drop in memory transaction speed (MTS) as DIMM slots are populated—just like any other vendors’ Xeon 5500-based servers.


2. Customers must buy RAM and disks for the B-series blades (and I would assume the C-series rack mount servers) from Cisco. There will be no support from TAC otherwise.


3. Even if you have an FCoE-capable storage array and you have FCoE converged network adapters (CNAs), you still can’t build an end-to-end FCoE solution. Why? Because you must put a standard Fibre Channel switch into the mix in order to provide fabric services like zoning, etc., because equipment like the UCS 6100 fabric interconnects and the Nexus 5000 don’t provide those services.

Thanks for the facts Scott, and I sure do hope that Cisco doesn't make you stop sharing your training with the rest of us!

HP & Cisco Battle for #2

It took a little while for calmer minds to prevail, however, the past few weeks have finally witnessed a return to common sense amongst reporters, analysts and prospective users of unified computing solutions. It’s as if the magical marketing dust sprinkled by the big players finally wore off, and everyone began to see the purported solutions for what they really are: full of warts and not quite baked. In fact, the only standards-based unified computing solution in production today as verified by announced commercial customers doesn’t even come from HP or Cisco but rather from Liquid Computing. This reality has left the two big players to battle one another for second place, and the mudslinging has started. Let’s take a look at some interesting recent events.

You all know how passionate I am when it comes to the issue of security. By removing the walls that separate servers, storage and switching you open the entire system up to a new generation of security concerns that cannot be resolved using traditional methods. HP seems to agree, since they quoted me and Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala as experts in their recent article (“One Giant Switch”), which exposes the holes in Cisco’s UCS product. Of course, the blogosphere’s reaction is that HP’s solution is no less problematic or complex since it’s based on old technology.

Next, I really have to salute Dan Kusnetsky of The 451 Group and ZDNet for going the extra mile for his blog to try and find a real, live production Cisco UCS customer with whom to speak with. You may recall that John Chambers proudly rolled out Savvis as an initial UCS beta customer. Well, that’s who Dan went to. The final paragraph of the interview ­­­sums it all up: “You’ll note that Bryan (Doerr) always spoke about Cisco’s UCS as something for the future. This is because the first few configurations have only recently been announced and are not in use in enough places for a datacenter’s manager to have full confidence in them. Cisco’s competitors, on the other hand, have years of experience in the field”.

Bravo Dan!