Home / HPE / HP Blade Systems and Cisco UCS - Innovative Approach

HP Blade Systems and Cisco UCS - Innovative Approach

Well today if we are talking about the advance and next generation networks and talked about the next generation IT strategy, Of course there are number of vendors in the market who are extremely doing extra-ordinary and provide the innovation needs to you. 

 Apart from IBM, Cisco, Dell and the other name in the Blade systems is HP. HP is making full efforts to make the product in the customers in-house and have a good competition with the Cisco and Dell.
If i am talking about the next generation IT strategy, there are many things evolved in it and these are mobility, cloud, computing and Big Data.
Fig 1.1- HP Blade Server Systems
HPE BladeSystem combined with the powerful HPE OneView management platform will help you streamline every step of your IT operations.

HP Blade systems like c7000 Enclosure holds up to 16 server blades and up to 8 compute, storage or workstation blades plus redundant network and storage interconnects. It includes a shared, multi-terabit high-speed midplane for wire-once connectivity of server blades to network and shared storage. Power is delivered through a pooled power backplane that ensures the full capacity of the redundant hot-plug power supplies is available to all system components. 

 You can populate a BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure with these components which contains 8 interconnect modules as :
  • Ethernet
  • Fibre Channel
  • Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) – Infini-Band
  • iSCSI
  • Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 

An BladeSystem Onboard Administrator management module is built in to the enclosure with the following functions: 
    • You can have inbuilt Robust, multiple enclosure setup and control.
    • It can also provide you the reports asset and inventory information for the devices in the enclosure.
    • apart from it you can have reports thermal and power information, including real-time actual power usage per server and per enclosure.
    • It is like Front-mounted Insight Display for easy management within the datacenter.
    • It has Integrated access to all server blade iLOs from a single cable.
    • It can also provides integrated access to interconnect bay device management ports from the single BladeSystem Onboard Administrator cable.
    • It will be like Single sign-on capability for all devices in the enclosure
    • So you have now role-based security locally and/or with LDAP directory services.
    • It also provides a wizard-based initial setup process for easy configuration. 

 So there are two models and they are c3000 and c7000 HP Blade system models but here i just discussed about the HP c7000 model in detail. It is also a high end model
If we are talking about the HP BladeSystem c7000 with Virtual Connect has between 31 and 70 percent more latency than Cisco UCS. Cisco UCS demonstrated lower latency than the HP BladeSystem c7000 with Virtual Connect for every test case and every packet size which is testing in the lab as a comparison of both the products.
Fig 1.2- Cisco UCS vs HP c7000

Well in the scenario where as packet sizes increased in each test of both the product ( HP c7000 and Cisco UCS 5108 Blade), the HP BladeSystem c7000 with Virtual Connect disadvantage also increased compared to Cisco UCS.

In terms of the performance of both the products whether it is HP c7000 or it is Cisco UCS 5108 Blade, both is almost identical for both single-chassis tests and multichassis tests for Cisco UCS. With the HP BladeSystem c7000 with Virtual Connect, after traffic leaves the chassis, latency increases dramatically. 

Now with the HP Blade System and the Virtual Connect, management is an after thought and also required a dedicated server hardware to handle basic functions of management such as chassis management, server configuration, and limited policy capabilities. HP OneView is a licensed, top-down software tool that is required if customers want any policy or profile capabilities.

With the help of HP OneView you can continues an established pattern seen with top- down software managers inspired by traditional systems. Policies cannot adapt to changing configurations or server types. 

Fig 1.3- Cisco UCS and the HP c7000 Chassis


Some of the Short-comes i really want to cover here now:

  • Well in the case of the Cisco UCS, it will provides the capability to automatically adapt server configurations to any server type or generation but sorry you can't do that with the HP OneView 
  • You can actually do service profile automation and templates, including resource pool creation and global policy creation and automation with the help of Cisco UCS while HP OneView does not have.
  • With the help of Cisco UCS you can enables comprehensive and detailed firmware policy creation and also distribution to both blade and rack servers. Cisco UCS provides detailed access control and multi-tenancy  enabling enterprise role-based access control (RBAC) while in the case of HP OneView you can't do that.
  • Yes and finally you can say that Cisco UCS Manager is the part of the Cisco UCS and have no further and additional cost while in HP you will have HP OneView with some licensing costs.