Cisco Cisco UCS C3160 Rack Server Libro blanco
Page
IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Data Center Management: The Key Ingredient for Reducing Server Power while Increasing Data Center Capacity
©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com
Cisco brings converged Ethernet and FCoE directly to the blade chassis—a key advantage. This
requires only four cables per chassis to support the same number of blades as HP while eliminating
a large percentage of the downstream switching and physical cabling required. Converged fabrics
carry the traffic for all networks, including compute, storage and management, through a 10 Gbps
Ethernet connection.
Another major advance with Cisco UCS blades is their use of virtual interface card (VIC) architecture,
Another major advance with Cisco UCS blades is their use of virtual interface card (VIC) architecture,
allowing dynamic I/O configuration based on policies defined in UCS Manager. This allows the cre-
ation of up to 128 PCIe devices, configured as a vNIC (virtual NIC) or vHBA (virtual HBA). This is
a significant concept, as it completely abstracts network configuration from the hardware, allowing it
to travel with the Service Profile—something that virtually no vendor other than Cisco can do. This
substantially reduces TCO and yields added benefits from increased network throughput and reliability,
and major decrease in required management intervention when migrating VMs to other hosts; not to
mention power savings from the reduced number of network components required.
Cisco UCS Manager is not only embedded in the UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects (FIs), but
Cisco UCS Manager is not only embedded in the UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects (FIs), but
also fully enabled in each blade with a dynamic dedicated private bandwidth for “Out Of Band”
management connectivity, totally separate from production network traffic. The FIs scale across
multiple blade server chassis in a single domain (potentially up to 40 chassis per FI). This eliminates
need for expensive switches in every chassis, duplicate management servers, and database servers—a
major savings compared with domain proliferation that can happen with HP at scale. UCS Manager
therefore can manage up to 320 servers in a single domain structure regardless and independent of
the total VM population.
Power Requirements
From a power perspective, there are a number of items to consider when comparing blade vendors.
In addition to the raw amount of power consumed by servers and other supporting hardware (such
as networking as outlined above), also consider the extra power required by management servers and
consoles. This is particularly interesting at scale, where power required by management and supporting
components must also scale. Comparing HP and Cisco, Cisco again has an advantage in this area from
a number of perspectives. First, UCS requires only one management server, compared with up to
four required by HP. Also, consider that each management server also requires an associated database
server, driving power requirements even higher, not to mention the management burden required to
maintain the servers and extra licensing costs.
From an architectural and management perspective, Cisco UCS compares very favorably against HP.
From an architectural and management perspective, Cisco UCS compares very favorably against HP.
UCS Manager can power up a blade and provision it from bare-metal state within a few minutes using
templates to define firmware on service profiles. This allows spare servers to be consolidated down
to a fraction of the quantity required by other vendors—saving a lot of power while reducing overall
hardware requirements and additional capital cost.
Blade Management Capabilities
Hardware is important when comparing blade server vendors, but management overhead plays an
even larger role in TCO than the hardware. Incumbent blade server vendors, HP included, base their
blade server management approach on existing management technologies, which are comprised of a
number of independently developed management technologies, integrated and extended to support