I work for a Cisco partner company and they gave me the sales pitch. On paper they look great, but I'm also looking for real life experiences with them. So far, not many reviews on them. Hoping someone here has tried them already...
I've worked with these in my current company. We had to provide integrations from our product to UCS (still in alpha stages). It's a mixed bag of feelings working with these beasts. They are quite complex to work with but their integration API is simple and consistent.
No. Cisco is new to the game and frankly, I don't trust them to stick to it. They're spreading themselves way too thin and today's Flip video news only seems to corroborate my belief. That and their solutions cost $TEXAS.
I work at a F100 company, we bought two of them to run UC (Unified Communications) and UCCE. They are amazing. They are instrumented incredibly, have an excellent API, designed fantastically. They are pretty much how you would design a blade center if you started from scratch and tried to learn from all the other systems.
The 10G uplinks and pinning, FCOE (and now with the new Nexus' you can do multihop FCOE if you are really gutsy).
Once you wrap you head around the idea of a logical server profile (which isn't that hard), they become very simple to work with. Well you will also have to expand you knowledge base to learn a little about storage and networks (but not that much).
The Palo cards are actually one of the coolest things anyone has created in a while, virtual PCI-e, its pretty cool.
As for whether they will stick with them or not, my thoughts are this, virtualization is dropping switch port counts in the core of your datacenter, Cisco has a choice, they can watch their revenue shrink, or create something like UCS and extend the data center surface area generating revenue. I think they will stick with it because they have to. AS for the price, list is high, but they actually give better than normal discounts on it (they explained the reason for this, but i don't remember right now).
As a point of comparison, we also purchased some HP c7000, they are really pretty crappy, we have had a lot of technical problems getting them working and frankly for every 16 blades you have another mgmt point, and a whole new set of uplinks and chassis infrastructure. HP really phoned it in.
Besides the c7000 there really isn't any competition.
I am sure this sounds a bit fawning, but we have had them for about a year, and I still think they are amazing ( and I am normally very cynical about new stuff, curmudgeonly even).
I've used the c7000's, and HP didn't require us to use professional services to install them.
I haven't had any problems with the mezzanine cards, but I do have problems with the VirtualConnect Flex-10 - applying configuration changes seemed to take an increasingly long time the more devices in the configuration. The other big annoyance with the VC is that the blade needs to be off to add more virtual NICs - so now I normally just add them all when I provision the blade and leave them disconnected.
The c7000's also seem quite picky about the versions of firmware installed on the various components.
I believe you can chain several c7000's together for management to reduce the pain a little. And you can always invest in HP's management software.
A plus for the c7000's is the flexibility of the blades: you can get HPUX versions (if you're unlucky enough to need HPUX), half and double height versions. Using the different sized blades does require some planning, as they impose some constraints - but even with this it does introduce some flexibility.
I used Dell's bladecenters a few years ago and they were okay, I know IBM/Fujitsu/ have them as well, so I wouldn't say there is no competition in the market.
I played with a UCS system (just one chassis) in our lab (~6-12 months ago), and I can't say I was hugely impressed. The documentation wasn't what I expect given my experience with Cisco's switch gear, and we had to update the firmware a couple of times to get past bugs. Maybe this is no longer the case. I didn't play with the API.
It's my understanding that if you want to do multihop FCoE then you have to stick with the same vendor for your switches, due to the different ways they implement FCoE.
IMHO I think the UCS cost is a big turnoff, maybe if you're in a huge environment (100's of chassis) the API is enough of a win to overcome the high cost - or maybe you can get a big enough discount.
WRT to Cisco staying in the market, I think they will for two reasons. The first is it increases their ability to sell more switch gear - you want FCoE or better link utilisation then, you need data center ethernet, which means you need new switches - and Cisco can now sell you both. Secondly it allows them to push FCoE and disrupt the FC market, which means they can sell more switches again.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 34.7 ms ] threadThe 10G uplinks and pinning, FCOE (and now with the new Nexus' you can do multihop FCOE if you are really gutsy).
Once you wrap you head around the idea of a logical server profile (which isn't that hard), they become very simple to work with. Well you will also have to expand you knowledge base to learn a little about storage and networks (but not that much).
The Palo cards are actually one of the coolest things anyone has created in a while, virtual PCI-e, its pretty cool.
As for whether they will stick with them or not, my thoughts are this, virtualization is dropping switch port counts in the core of your datacenter, Cisco has a choice, they can watch their revenue shrink, or create something like UCS and extend the data center surface area generating revenue. I think they will stick with it because they have to. AS for the price, list is high, but they actually give better than normal discounts on it (they explained the reason for this, but i don't remember right now).
As a point of comparison, we also purchased some HP c7000, they are really pretty crappy, we have had a lot of technical problems getting them working and frankly for every 16 blades you have another mgmt point, and a whole new set of uplinks and chassis infrastructure. HP really phoned it in.
Besides the c7000 there really isn't any competition.
I am sure this sounds a bit fawning, but we have had them for about a year, and I still think they are amazing ( and I am normally very cynical about new stuff, curmudgeonly even).
When compared to the Palo Cards the are seriously deficient.
We also didn't like that HP PS had to come in to install the system.
I haven't had any problems with the mezzanine cards, but I do have problems with the VirtualConnect Flex-10 - applying configuration changes seemed to take an increasingly long time the more devices in the configuration. The other big annoyance with the VC is that the blade needs to be off to add more virtual NICs - so now I normally just add them all when I provision the blade and leave them disconnected.
The c7000's also seem quite picky about the versions of firmware installed on the various components.
I believe you can chain several c7000's together for management to reduce the pain a little. And you can always invest in HP's management software.
A plus for the c7000's is the flexibility of the blades: you can get HPUX versions (if you're unlucky enough to need HPUX), half and double height versions. Using the different sized blades does require some planning, as they impose some constraints - but even with this it does introduce some flexibility.
I used Dell's bladecenters a few years ago and they were okay, I know IBM/Fujitsu/ have them as well, so I wouldn't say there is no competition in the market.
I played with a UCS system (just one chassis) in our lab (~6-12 months ago), and I can't say I was hugely impressed. The documentation wasn't what I expect given my experience with Cisco's switch gear, and we had to update the firmware a couple of times to get past bugs. Maybe this is no longer the case. I didn't play with the API.
It's my understanding that if you want to do multihop FCoE then you have to stick with the same vendor for your switches, due to the different ways they implement FCoE.
IMHO I think the UCS cost is a big turnoff, maybe if you're in a huge environment (100's of chassis) the API is enough of a win to overcome the high cost - or maybe you can get a big enough discount.
WRT to Cisco staying in the market, I think they will for two reasons. The first is it increases their ability to sell more switch gear - you want FCoE or better link utilisation then, you need data center ethernet, which means you need new switches - and Cisco can now sell you both. Secondly it allows them to push FCoE and disrupt the FC market, which means they can sell more switches again.