Cisco Cisco UCS C200 M2 High-Density Rack Server 白書
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IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Data Center Management: The Key Ingredient for Reducing Server Power while Increasing Data Center Capacity
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new technologies like blade servers and controlled by a top-down orchestration engine. The result is an
unfortunate mish-mash of somewhat integrated components that typically require multiple agents and
consoles or applets, not to mention a lot of training in order for staff to understand all of the moving
parts. In addition, incumbent vendors also tend to price their management components separately,
further adding to the solution TCO.
Cisco began with a blank slate, taking advantage of their deep hardware management heritage and
Cisco began with a blank slate, taking advantage of their deep hardware management heritage and
strong partnerships with Intel, EMC and VMware to build management components directly into the
blade, chassis and networking hardware. Advantages of this approach include a single management
agent on each blade, coupled with a true single management console. HP, along with most other blade
vendors, requires a dedicated management blade for each chassis and multiple software management
agents on each blade. This also requires multiple consoles or a single console view with multiple applets
to access the various consoles.
Cisco’s architecture does not consume a blade for management, allowing one extra production server
Cisco’s architecture does not consume a blade for management, allowing one extra production server
blade per 16 blades. They use a single, lean UCS agent, increasing overall blade capacity. Cisco includes
the UCS management stack in the base price of its solutions with the exception of BMC BladeLogic,
which is an OEM that provides bare-metal provisioning for Cisco and other blade vendor hardware.
Cisco integrates UCS Manager with many other management software companies’ products as well—
not just BladeLogic. A key advantage of the Cisco architecture is that logic is pushed to the level of the
action—when a blade is defined, it is given a set of policies that enable it to make intelligent, policy-
based management decisions without requiring the latency and overhead of an orchestrator.
Digging into HP’s blade management stack, one discovers a bewildering “alphabet soup” of compo-
Digging into HP’s blade management stack, one discovers a bewildering “alphabet soup” of compo-
nents. HP requires the Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager (VCEM), Insight Control Environment
(ICE) bundle, HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM), HP Integrated Lights-out (iLO) Web interface, HP
On-board Administrator, and HP Insight Dynamics VSE Suite, etc., which is comprised of up to 11
agents and up to four different management consoles. This requires a staggering amount of memory
and processor overhead on every server, not to mention the administrative overhead required to main-
tain all of the management components, as the numerous interdependencies and complexities of the
HP schema can cause failures if firmware versions fall out of synchronization.
Cisco UCS, in contrast to HP, requires a single Cisco UCS Manager console and a single UCS manage-
Cisco UCS, in contrast to HP, requires a single Cisco UCS Manager console and a single UCS manage-
ment agent per blade. Cisco also designed UCS Manager to work with more than just UCS blades.
Cisco is adding support for Cisco rack mount servers to UCS Manager, which can also manage UCS
network switches and Fabric Interconnect devices. When you consider the amount of additional instal-
lation, staff training and management overhead required for the HP blade solution, it is easy to see how
Cisco comes out ahead from this perspective.
The one blade management technology that Cisco did not build in-house was bare-metal provisioning,
The one blade management technology that Cisco did not build in-house was bare-metal provisioning,
which they chose to provide via tight integration with BMC BladeLogic, a highly regarded, agnostic,
multi-vendor blade provisioning solution. Cisco fully integrated UCS with BladeLogic using open
interfaces, performing all management tasks from the same UCS Manager console. In addition to
simplifying provisioning management, BladeLogic integration also allows UCS to manage non-Cisco
blades. Cisco UCS Manager is also fully integrated with other management software suppliers as well,
such as CA, Symantec/Altiris, Microsoft, EMC , VMware and even HP and IBM. Interesting enough,
Cisco provides full access to developers and uses standard XML API, so custom tools can be integrated
with UCS Manager via a Cisco API SDK.