Cisco's New Blades a Great Deal for IT? - Page 2

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Buy more, spend less

Cisco is notoriously pricey, but for UCS, it has an argument that the more you buy, the more you save. Here's why. The first chassis needs to have a fabric interconnect that connects to the Unified Fabric. Each subsequent chassis only needs a fabric extender, which connects to the interconnect.

The interconnects are under $4,000, much cheaper than the five-figure cost of a switch in every chassis that other blades require, argues Durzan. Plus, no management software is needed for each blade or chassis, because everything is managed from the fabric. So even though the chassis costs more and blades cost roughly the same as other blade servers, the savings in software and switches adds up as the server scales up.

Cisco's connection is built on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), whereas Sun's recent Open Compute Environment, a blade system very similar to UCS announced on Monday, uses Infiniband. Durzan said he's confident Cisco made the right choice.

"I've looked at Infiniband, I've looked at Ethernet, and as someone said in the past, you never bet against Ethernet. Bringing in Infiniband is bringing a whole other fabric into your datacenter," he said.

By reducing the number of switches, Cisco argues its blades reduce cabling by 40 percent, power consumption by 30 percent and allow for 50 percent more physical servers.

More important, Cisco thinks the blades are so powerful that customers will be able to expand their virtualization uses. "I have heard customers say 'we're going to start looking at virtualizing apps that we couldn't virtualize before because of the improved performance and things like hypervisor bypass,'" said Durzan.

Making a dent in the blade server market

Between them, HP and IBM own about 80 percent of the blade market, but Liam McGlynn, senior analyst for systems management at Enterprise Management Associates, thinks Cisco can make a big dent in that.

"The more you scale, the cheaper it gets. If I were an IT manager, how could I overlook this? This will save me money, this will make auto provisioning easier. This will reduce power consumption. I think Cisco is going to make a killing," he told InternetNews.com.

Specifically, McGlynn says he thinks the reduced network hardware, auto provisioning and massive memory banks will be the big appeals to the blades.

"Those three things together are going to make a difference not because it's a leapfrog over the competition, but a real step forward," he said. "I think HP and IBM and the rest will have an interesting time trying to close the window I think Cisco has right now."

Cisco plans to ship its Unified Computing Systems at the end of this quarter.