Cisco Makes The Charts – Now No. 3 In Blades

May 25, 2011, 9:11 am

≫ Next: HP Stirs The Pot With New Converged Infrastructure Offerings

When Cisco began shipping UCS slightly over two years ago, competitor reaction ranged the gamut from concerned to gleefully dismissive of their chances at success in the server market. The reasons given for their guaranteed lack of success were a combination of technical (the product won't really work), the economics (Cisco can't live on server margins) to cultural (Cisco doesn't know servers and can't succeed in a market where they are not the quasi-monopolistic dominating player). Some ignored them, and some attempted to preemptively introduce products that delivered similar functionality, and in the two years following introduction, competitive reaction was very similar - yes they are selling, but we don't think they are a significant threat.

Any lingering doubt about whether Cisco can become a credible supplier has been laid to rest with Cisco's recent quarterly financial disclosures and IDC's revelation that Cisco is now the No. 3 worldwide blade vendor, with slightly over 10% of worldwide (and close to 20% in North America) blade server shipments. In their quarterly call, Cisco revealed Q1 revenues of $171 million, for a $684 million revenue run rate, and claimed a booking run rate of $900 million annually. In addition, they placed their total customer count at 5,400. While actual customer count is hard to verify, Cisco has been reporting a steady and impressive growth in customers since initial shipment, and Forrester's anecdotal data confirms both the significant interest and installed UCS systems among Forrester's clients.

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HP Stirs The Pot With New Converged Infrastructure Offerings

June 7, 2011, 11:02 am

≫ Next: Cisco Tweaks UCS - New Interfaces, Management Software Expand Capabilities

≪ Previous: Cisco Makes The Charts – Now No. 3 In Blades

HP this week really stirred up the Converged Infrastructure world by introducing three new solution offerings, one an incremental evolution of an existing offering and the other two representing new options which will put increased pressure on competitors. The trio includes:

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Cisco Tweaks UCS - New Interfaces, Management Software Expand Capabilities

July 13, 2011, 12:11 pm

≫ Next: Xsigo Expands to a Data Center Fabric: Converged Infrastructure for the Virtual Data Center

≪ Previous: HP Stirs The Pot With New Converged Infrastructure Offerings

Not to be left out of the announcement fever that has gripped vendors recently, Cisco today announced several updates to their UCS product line aimed at easing potential system bottlenecks by improving the whole I/O chain between the network and the servers, and improving management, including:

Improved Fabric Interconnect (FI) - The FI is the top of the UCS hardware hierarchy, a thinly disguised Nexus 5xxx series switch that connects the UCS hierarchy to the enterprise network and runs the UCS Manager (UCSM) software. Previously the highest end FI had 40 ports, each of which had to be specifically configured as Ethernet, FCoE, or FC. The new FI, the model 6248UP has 48 ports, each one of which can be flexibly assigned as up toa 10G port for any of the supported protocols. In addition to modestly raising the bandwidth, the 6248UP brings increased flexibility and a claimed 40% reduction in latency.
New Fabric Extender (FEX) - The FEXC connects the individual UCS chassis with the FI. With the new 2208 FEX, Cisco doubles the bandwidth between the chassis and the FI.
VIC1280 Virtual Interface Card (VIC) - At the bottom of the management hierarchy the new VIC1280 quadruples the bandwidth to each individual server to a total of 80 GB. The 80 GB can be presented as up to 8 10 GB physical NICs or teamed into a pair fo 40 Gb NICS, with up to 256 virtual devices (vNIC, vHBA, etc presented to the software running on the servers.

Taken as a whole, these improvements should help to communicate that Cisco intends to allow their UCS environments to scale as customer requirements evolve, as well as nullifying some fo the competitor FUD about bandwidth limitations of UCS. They do not remove the fact that one of UCS's weaknesses is that bandwidth scaling is decoupled from the scaling of the number of server nodes, but should move the bar higher for UCS users.

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Xsigo Expands to a Data Center Fabric: Converged Infrastructure for the Virtual Data Center

September 12, 2011, 8:50 am

≫ Next: AMD Releases Interlagos And Valencia – Bulldozers In The Cloud

≪ Previous: Cisco Tweaks UCS - New Interfaces, Management Software Expand Capabilities

Last year at VMworld I noted Xsigo Systems, a small privately held company at VMworld showing their I/O Director technology, which delivereda subset of HP Virtual Connect or Cisco UCS I/O virtualization capability in a fashion that could be consumed by legacy rack-mount servers from any vendor. I/O Director connects to the server with one or more 10 G Ethernet links, and then splits traffic out into enterprise Ethernet and FC networks. On the server side, the applications, including VMware, see multiple virtual NICs and HBAs courtesy of Xsigo's proprietary virtual NIC driver.

Controlled via Xsigo's management console, the server MAC and WWNs can be programmed, and the servers can now connect to multiple external networks with fewer cables and substantially lower costs for NIC and HBA hardware. Virtualized I/O is one of the major transformative developments in emerging data center architecture, and will remain a theme in Forrester's data center research coverage.

This year at VMworld, Xsigo announced a major expansion of their capabilities - Xsigo Server Fabric, which takes the previous rack-scale single-Xsigo switch domains and links them into a data-center-scale fabric. Combined with improvements in the software and UI, Xsigo now claims to offer one-click connection of any server resource to any network or storage resource within the domain of Xsigo's fabric. Most significantly, Xsigo's interface is optimized to allow connection of VMs to storage and network resources, and to allow the creation of private VM-VM links.

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AMD Releases Interlagos And Valencia – Bulldozers In The Cloud

November 16, 2011, 7:52 am

≫ Next: IBM Raises The Bar On Converged Infrastructure With PureFlex And PureApplication Integrated Offerings

≪ Previous: Xsigo Expands to a Data Center Fabric: Converged Infrastructure for the Virtual Data Center

This week AMD finally released their AMD 6200 and 4200 series CPUs. These are the long-awaited server-oriented Interlagos and Valencia CPUs, based on their new "Bulldozer" core, offering up to 16 x86 cores in a single socket. The announcement was targeted at (drum roll, one guess per customer only) … "The Cloud." AMD appears to be positioning its new architectures as the platform of choice for cloud-oriented workloads, focusing on highly threaded throughput oriented benchmarks that take full advantage of its high core count and unique floating point architecture, along with what look like excellent throughput per Watt metrics.

At the same time it is pushing the now seemingly mandatory "cloud" message, AMD is not ignoring the meat-and-potatoes enterprise workloads that have been the mainstay of server CPUs sales -virtualization, database, and HPC, where the combination of many cores, excellent memory bandwidth and large memory configurations should yield excellent results. In its competitive comparisons, AMD targets Intel's 5640 CPU, which it claims represents Intel's most widely used Xeon CPU, and shows very favorable comparisons in regards to performance, price and power consumption. Among the features that AMD cites as contributing to these results are:

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IBM Raises The Bar On Converged Infrastructure With PureFlex And PureApplication Integrated Offerings

April 20, 2012, 11:53 am

≫ Next: HP Rolls Out BladeSystem Upgrades – Significant Improvements Aim To Fend Off IBM And Cisco

≪ Previous: AMD Releases Interlagos And Valencia – Bulldozers In The Cloud

IBM Jumps On CI With Both Feet

Over the last couple of years, IBM, despite having a rich internal technology ecosystem and a number of competitive blade and CI offerings, has not had a comprehensive integrated offering to challenge HP's CloudSystem Matrix and Cisco's UCS. This past week IBM effectively silenced its critics and jumped to the head of the CI queue with the announcement of two products, PureFlex and PureApplication, the results of a massive multi-year engineering investment in blade hardware, systems management, networking, and storage integration. Based on a new modular blade architecture and new management architecture, the two products are really more of a continuum of a product defined by the level of software rather than two separate technology offerings.

PureFlex is the base product, consisting of the new hardware (which despite having the same number of blades as the existing HS blade products, is in fact a totally new piece of hardware), which integrates both BNT-based networking as well as a new object-based management architecture which can manage up to four chassis and provide a powerful setoff optimization, installation, and self-diagnostic functions for the hardware and software stack up to and including the OS images and VMs. In addition IBM appears to have integrated the complete suite of Open Fabric Manager and Virtual Fabric for remapping MAC/WWN UIDs and managing VM networking connections, and storage integration via the embedded V7000 storage unit, which serves as both a storage pool and an aggregation point for virtualizing external storage. The laundry list of features and functions is too long to itemize here, but PureFlex, especially with its hypervisor-neutrality and IBM's Cloud FastStart option, is a complete platform for an enterprise private cloud or a horizontal VM compute farm, however you choose to label a shared VM utility.

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HP Rolls Out BladeSystem Upgrades – Significant Improvements Aim To Fend Off IBM And Cisco

June 5, 2012, 8:36 am

≫ Next: Oracle Delivers On SPARC Promises

≪ Previous: IBM Raises The Bar On Converged Infrastructure With PureFlex And PureApplication Integrated Offerings

Overview

Earlier this week at its Discover customer event, HP announced a significant set of improvements to its already successful c-Class BladeSystem product line, which, despite continuing competitive pressure from IBM and the entry of Cisco into the market three years ago, still commands approximately 50% of the blade market. The significant components of this announcement fall into four major functional buckets - improved hardware, simplified and expanded storage features, new interconnects and I/O options, and serviceability enhancements. Among the highlights are:

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Oracle Delivers On SPARC Promises

January 13, 2013, 10:33 am

≫ Next: HP Shows its Next Generation Blade and Converged Infrastructure – No Revolution, but Strong Evolution

≪ Previous: HP Rolls Out BladeSystem Upgrades – Significant Improvements Aim To Fend Off IBM And Cisco

Background

When I returned to Forrester in mid-2010, one of the first blog posts I wrote was about Oracle's new roadmap for SPARC and Solaris, catalyzed by numerous client inquiries and other interactions in which Oracle's real level of commitment to future SPARC hardware was the topic of discussion. In most cases I could describe the customer mood as skeptical at best, and panicked and committed to migration off of SPARC and Solaris at worst. Nonetheless, after some time spent with Oracle management, I expressed my improved confidence in the new hardware team that Oracle had assembled and their new roadmap for SPARC processors after the successive debacles of the UltraSPARC-5 and Rock processors under Sun's stewardship.

Two and a half years later, it is obvious that Oracle has delivered on its commitments regarding SPARC and is continuing its investments in SPARC CPU and system design as well as its Solaris OS technology. The latest evolution of SPARC technology, the SPARC T5 and the soon-to-be-announced M5, continue the evolution and design practices set forth by Oracle's Rick Hetherington in 2010 -- incremental evolution of a common set of SPARC cores, differentiation by variation of core count, threads and cache as opposed to fundamental architecture, and a reliable multi-year performance progression of cores and system scalability.

Geek Stuff - New SPARC Hardware

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HP Shows its Next Generation Blade and Converged Infrastructure – No Revolution, but Strong Evolution

February 21, 2013, 4:58 am

≫ Next: Dell Introduces FX system - the Shape of Infrastructure to Come?

≪ Previous: Oracle Delivers On SPARC Promises

With the next major spin of Intel server CPUs due later this year, HP's customers have been waiting for HP's next iteration of its core c-Class BladeSystem, which has been on the market for almost 7 years without any major changes to its basic architecture. IBM made a major enhancement to its BladeCenter architecture, replacing it with the new Pure Systems, and Cisco's offering is new enough that it should last for at least another three years without a major architectural refresh, leaving HP customers to wonder when HP was going to introduce its next blade enclosure, and whether it would be compatible with current products.

At their partner conference this week, HP announced a range of enhancements to its blade product line that on combination represent a strong evolution of the current product while maintaining compatibility with current investments. This positioning is similar to what IBM did with its BladeCenter to BladeCenter-H upgrade, preserving current customer investment and extending the life of the current server and peripheral modules for several more years.

Tech Stuff - What Was Announced

Among the goodies announced on February 19 was an assortment of performance and functionality enhancements, including:

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Dell Introduces FX system - the Shape of Infrastructure to Come?

November 5, 2014, 1:28 pm

≫ Next: Shifting Sands – Changing Alliances Underscore the Dynamism of the Infrastructure Systems Market

≪ Previous: HP Shows its Next Generation Blade and Converged Infrastructure – No Revolution, but Strong Evolution

Dell today announced its new FX system architecture, and I am decidedly impressed.

Dell FX is a 2U flexible infrastructure building block that allows infrastructure architects to compose an application-appropriate server and storage infrastructure out of the following set of resources:

Multiple choices of server nodes, ranging from multi-core Atom to new Xeon E5 V3 servers. With configurations ranging from 2 to 16 server nodes per enclosure, there is pretty much a configuration point for most mainstream applications.

A novel flexible method of mapping disks from up to three optional disk modules, each with 16 drives - the mapping, controlled by the onboard management, allows each server to appear as if the disk is locally attached DASD, so no changes are needed in any software that thinks it is accessing local storage. A very slick evolution in storage provisioning.

A set of I/O aggregators for consolidating Ethernet and FC I/O from the enclosure.

All in all, an attractive and flexible packaging scheme for infrastructure that needs to be tailored to specific combinations of server, storage and network configurations. Probably an ideal platform to support the Nutanix software suite that Dell is reselling as well. My guess is that other system design groups are thinking along these lines, but this is now a pretty unique package, and merits attention from infrastructure architects.

Forrester clients, I've published a Quick Take report on this, Quick Take: Dell's FX Architecture Holds Promise To Power Modern Services

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Shifting Sands – Changing Alliances Underscore the Dynamism of the Infrastructure Systems Market

December 8, 2014, 7:54 am

≫ Next: Nokia Takes Over Alcatel-Lucent: Get Ready For A Shift In The Global Network Solutions Vendor Landscape

≪ Previous: Dell Introduces FX system - the Shape of Infrastructure to Come?

There is always a tendency to regard the major players in large markets as being a static background against which the froth of smaller companies and the rapid dance of customer innovation plays out. But if we turn our lens toward the major server vendors (who are now also storage and networking as well as software vendors), we see that the relatively flat industry revenues hide almost continuous churn. Turn back the clock slightly more than five years ago, and the market was dominated by three vendors, HP, Dell and IBM. In slightly more than five years, IBM has divested itself of highest velocity portion of its server business, Dell is no longer a public company, Lenovo is now a major player in servers, Cisco has come out of nowhere to mount a serious challenge in the x86 server segment, and HP has announced that it intends to split itself into two companies.

And it hasn't stopped. Two recent events, the fracturing of the VCE consortium and the formerly unthinkable hook-up of IBM and Cisco illustrate the urgency with which existing players are seeking differential advantage, and reinforce our contention that the whole segment of converged and integrated infrastructure remains one of the active and profitable segments of the industry.

EMC's recent acquisition of Cisco's interest in VCE effectively acknowledged what most customers have been telling us for a long time - that VCE had become essentially an EMC-driven sales vehicle to sell storage, supported by VMware (owned by EMC) and Cisco as a systems platform. EMC's purchase of Cisco's interest also tacitly acknowledges two underlying tensions in the converged infrastructure space:

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Nokia Takes Over Alcatel-Lucent: Get Ready For A Shift In The Global Network Solutions Vendor Landscape

April 17, 2015, 1:24 am

≫ Next: Sea Changes in the Industry – A New HP and a New Dell Face Off

≪ Previous: Shifting Sands – Changing Alliances Underscore the Dynamism of the Infrastructure Systems Market

Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent have entered into a memorandum of understanding under which Nokia will make an offer for Alcatel-Lucent in an all-share transaction. The deal values Alcatel-Lucent at €15.6 billion: Alcatel-Lucent shareholders will own 33.5%, with Nokia shareholders owning 66.5%.

Is this a "marriage of desperation" or two network solution vendors coming together to work on a broader vision for an increasingly connected world? The combination of two relatively small network solutions vendors won't automatically translate into the formation of a new network solutions powerhouse. Most importantly, will the new Nokia truly differ from its main rivals Huawei and Ericsson as an end-to-end carrier network solution provider? Nokia's competitors will not only face a larger new competitor but also experience the formation of a different one. This deal will mean that:

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Sea Changes in the Industry – A New HP and a New Dell Face Off

November 9, 2015, 10:32 am

≫ Next: Emphasize Emotion In Your Holiday Customer Service

≪ Previous: Nokia Takes Over Alcatel-Lucent: Get Ready For A Shift In The Global Network Solutions Vendor Landscape

The acquisition of EMC by Dell has is generating an immense amount of hype and prose, much of it looking forward at how the merged entity will try and compete in cloud, integrate and rationalize its new product line, and how Dell will pay for it (see Forrester report "Quick Take: Dell Buys EMC, Creating a New Legacy Vendor"). Interestingly not a lot has been written about the changes in the fundamental competitive faceoff between Dell and HP, both newly transformed by divestiture and by acquisition.

Yesterday the competition was straightforward and relatively easy to characterize. HP is the dominant enterprise server vendor, Dell a strong challenger, both with PCs and both with some storage IP that was good but in no sense dominant. Both have competent data center practices and embryonic cloud strategies which were still works in process. Post transformation we have a totally different picture with two very transformed companies:

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Emphasize Emotion In Your Holiday Customer Service

December 4, 2018, 10:20 am

≫ Next: DAM Or Web CMS? Part 2: Find Out Which DX Technology You Need For Workflow And Delivery

≪ Previous: Sea Changes in the Industry – A New HP and a New Dell Face Off

This blog post is part of Forrester’s Holiday 2018 retail series. As the holidays approach and the post-holiday return rush quickly follows, a few things will occur simultaneously: Hundreds of millions of customers will make purchases, total holiday retail sales will push the $720 billion mark, and millions more will send odd, ill-fitting, or unwanted gifts […]

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DAM Or Web CMS? Part 2: Find Out Which DX Technology You Need For Workflow And Delivery

December 4, 2018, 11:10 am

≫ Next: The Future Of Mobility Is Data, Not Cars

≪ Previous: Emphasize Emotion In Your Holiday Customer Service

In the second part of our series, we take a look at workflow and delivery and where digital asset management and web content management systems excel. If you haven’t seen the first part of our analysis, make sure you check it out. Do you need more help? Forrester clients can set up an inquiry with […]

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The Future Of Mobility Is Data, Not Cars

December 5, 2018, 8:39 am

≫ Next: The TV Industry Is Stumbling Toward Customer Centricity

≪ Previous: DAM Or Web CMS? Part 2: Find Out Which DX Technology You Need For Workflow And Delivery

Having worked in and with the automotive industry for around 25 years, the challenges that OEMs face given their size and structures often inhibit the business agility needed to provide lasting customer value in an age of digital disruption. The focus has always been more skewed toward the product experience and product features and defining […]

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The TV Industry Is Stumbling Toward Customer Centricity

December 5, 2018, 10:13 am

≫ Next: Quantifying Vendor Efficacy Using The MITRE ATT&CK Evaluation

≪ Previous: The Future Of Mobility Is Data, Not Cars

I’ve just returned from a few days in the sun, having once again participated in Beet.TV’s annual Beet Retreat. (Wonderfully, we returned to Puerto Rico this year.*) The theme was “It’s Consumer-First in TV Land,” which I really hoped the conference would pay off on. Why? Well, we know that consumer attitudes about advertising are […]

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Quantifying Vendor Efficacy Using The MITRE ATT&CK Evaluation

December 5, 2018, 10:34 am

≫ Next: Video: Why Everyone Needs To Know About Low-Code

≪ Previous: The TV Industry Is Stumbling Toward Customer Centricity

I’ve been extremely excited about the MITRE ATT&CK evaluation since it decided to open it up to vendors earlier this year. The endpoint detection and response (EDR) market represents the direction of endpoint security, yet the state of endpoint efficacy testing has been underwhelming. • Antimalware testing has become a standard part of the endpoint […]

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