Blessay:Cisco UCS Really Is Just Blade Servers With Fancy NICs & A Response to HP Network Ambition

I was review­ing some doc­u­ment­a­tion the Cisco web site for an archi­tec­tural white paper and came across this image in some mar­ket­ing material

What this image clearly shows is that the UCS strategy is really about get­ting a fancy NIC into a server.

Each blade has a fab­ric con­nec­tion card to the UCS 6100 (fab­ric inter­con­nect), which then con­nects to a Nexus 5000 (the fab­ric master).  

Why does this matter ?

Simple. Lets con­sider HP and their C-​​Class chassis. HP has their “Virtual Connect” strategy for blade serv­ers with the NonStop fab­ric that con­nect all the serv­ers via the mezzan­ine cards to Interconnect mod­ules. Interconnect mod­ules sup­port Fibrechannel, Infiniband and Ethernet and so on. This means that HP can con­trol all the choices that the cus­tomer can make for the serv­ers because they “own” the design of the blade server chassis.

When bladeserv­ers were first released, IBM and HP had Cisco develop mod­ules that could be installed. More recently though, IBM has stopped even offer­ing Cisco switches for large parts of its port­fo­lio and HP is quite hos­tile — in the “HP Virtual Connect for Cisco Network Administrators” they refer to the Cisco switches as “tra­di­tional approach to admin­is­ter­ing the net­work”. Thats got to smart a bit.

Want to bet that HP didn’t want to play ?

Why wouldn’t HP want Cisco to provide the net­work­ing ? My guess is that HP has net­work­ing under devel­op­ment and they are freez­ing Cisco out of the data centre. HP has made sub­stan­tial inroads at the edge of the net­work with their ProCurve products. The Data Centre net­work is an entirely logical next step. Its incre­mental, extends their server expert­ise /​ port­fo­lio and integ­ra­tion and can eas­ily be sold to exist­ing cus­tom­ers through the server teams.

So HP might have shut Cisco out?

So Cisco does servers ?

I think HP did so. HP used the Tandem acquis­i­tion to put the NonStop server fab­ric into their blade serv­ers, then built net­work­ing mod­ules that posi­tioned them as com­pet­it­ors to Cisco. This was prob­ably some time in 2007.

Cisco response has been to build a net­work fab­ric, func­tion­ally sim­ilar to the NonStop server fab­ric, but with much deeper integ­ra­tion into the net­work offer­ing much greater vir­tu­al­isa­tion of the stor­age and net­work lay­ers. This is con­sist­ent with their cur­rent mar­ket­ing mes­sage around their net­work his­tory (although, with video, voice and home products who knows what Cisco is really about these days).

And its all about the message

This gives Cisco a “mes­sage” that their product is “dif­fer­ent” from HP or IBM. A dif­fer­en­ti­ator like this can be used to ini­ti­ate new oppor­tun­it­ies with cus­tom­ers — to make that into English, you can approach the CIO /​ CTO and try and flog your new strategy. They had to make some new tech­no­lo­gies such as FCoE and all its sup­port­ing tech­no­logy, but that’s just a few broken eggs.

And they had to build the blade serv­ers. Obviously. If Cisco didn’t make their own serv­ers no-​​one else was going to put Cisco net­work­ing in. Easy decision from that per­spect­ive, and John Chambers is an ambi­tious man. Growing the busi­ness in the data centre by extend­ing into the server farm makes logical sense. Remember, HP is likely to extend from the server into the net­work, so meet­ing them in the mar­ket is nat­ural. Especially with the hype about Cloud Computing devel­op­ing over the last two years.

But the actual serv­ers are not dif­fer­ent from any­thing else in the mar­ket. They are a little bit ahead of the curve, but HP/​IBM will there with sim­ilar products in a few months.

Its all about the network.

So, where is the Special Sauce ?

The HP Virtual Connect sys­tem does Ethernet, Fibrechannel and Infiniband as sep­ar­ate ele­ments or mezzan­ine cards.

Cisco uses a single Ethernet fab­ric to do all of this. By cre­at­ing FCoE from noth­ing, Cisco can com­bine all stor­age and net­work access over a single Layer 1 con­nec­tion. To tick off the marketecture:

• no fibre­chan­nel = less com­pon­ents = less power & cost
• uni­fied fab­ric = less con­fig­ur­a­tion = less OpEx
• uni­fied fab­ric = less equip­ment = less CapEx
• uni­fied fab­ric = more flex­ib­il­ity = ser­vice auto­ma­tion = cloud com­put­ing (BINGO!)

You get the idea, I am sure.

HP and Cisco — Frenemies ?

I wrote some­thing about this here

Conclusion

As a designer, this little graphic made UCS much more com­pre­hens­ible. The mar­ket­ing mes­sage that UCS is some sort of revolu­tion has obscured my think­ing. I was look­ing for rocket sci­ence, and all I got was mar­ket­ing smoke. And some bendy mirrors.

But I wish they would use nice smelling smoke next time. This one still smells a bit fishy.

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