

Ask HN: Anyone using Cisco servers/blade servers? (Cisco UCS) - johng

Just curious if anyone here has used/played with the Cisco UCS servers/blades. I have yet to run into anyone using them or find any good reviews.<p>Thanks in advance...
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iwillrespondtoq
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).

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johng
This is the first complaint I've seen about the C7000 systems, seemingly, they
are the "blade" solution to beat. Any specifics?

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jbarber
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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orlandop
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...

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ins0mniac
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.

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runjake
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.

