Cisco’s server power engineering team recently compared the Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis with B200 M3 blade servers against HP’s BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure and HP ProLiant BL460c Gen8 blade servers.

The results weren’t surprising internally, but they might surprise you. The main findings were:

Efficiency
The Cisco UCS 5108 enclosure configured with Cisco UCS B200 M3 blades achieved a 6.3% higher performance-to-power ratio than the HP BladeSystem c7000 with HP ProLiant BL460c blades, using with similarly configured hardware, BIOS, and OS settings.
At a 70% target load, the Cisco UCS blade solution consumed 6.5% less power than the HP ProLiant blade solution.
Power
At the maximum target load, the Cisco UCS blade solution consumed 192 watts (W), or 7.2% less power, than the equivalently configured HP BladeSystem solution.
The Cisco UCS blade solution consumed 167 watts, or 17.4% less power, while idle than the equivalently configured HP BladeSystem solution: a difference equivalent to the power consumed by three idle HP ProLiant BL460c Gen8 blades.
Including the power consumed by a pair of redundant Fabric Interconnects, the Cisco UCS blade solution consumes less power than an equivalent HP BladeSystem solution.

The complete results are posted on Cisoc.com (link to download the entire white paper) so that you can replicate the results independently.

What are our customers saying about their power and cooling savings? See my previous blog post “Cisco UCS Servers – Watts driving your power and cooling costs?”

How much could you save by switching to UCS?

Would you like to learn more about how Cisco UCS can help you? There are more than 250 published datacenter case studies on Cisco.com. Additionally, there is a TCO/ROI tool that will allow you to compare your existing environment to a new UCS Solution. For a more in-depth TCO/ROI analysis, contact your Cisco partner.

Tags: B200, power, UCS

I recently worked with Loughborough University on a financial impact study of their initial deployment of Cisco UCS. The study documents their findings of a dramatic improvement in IT efficiency, bearing out the advantages that attracted them to the UCS solution. Loughborough’s Customer Case Study has been revised with the results of this TCO study as well new details on the next stage of their deployment of Cisco Virtual Experience Infrastructure (VXI) Smart Solution.

We examined Loughborough’s projected growth rates and compared the continuation of their previous rack server environment against a UCS solution combined with an expansion of their virtualized environment. Server consolidation and reduced administrator workload contributed to exceptional results: a total savings of US$878,789 (40% OpEx and 60% CapEx) with a 225% ROI and 22% IRR. Compared to the previous environment, Loughborough’s UCS deployment will drive down cost in several key areas over the coming five years:

As a result of Cisco’s Unified Fabric approach, the study shows that Loughborough will need only six switches (three redundant pairs) to support their end state vs. 30 in their legacy environment and a corresponding reduction in cables from 646 to just 44.

These results are typical to what other customers achieve when they switch to UCS. See my first blog post, Yes, Cisco UCS servers are that good.

Would you like to learn more about how Cisco UCS can help you? There are more than 250 published datacenter case studies on Cisco.com. Additionally, there is a TCO/ROI tool that will allow you to compare your existing environment to a new UCS Solution. For a more in-depth TCO/ROI analysis, contact your Cisco partner.

Tags: B-Series, B200, blades, capex, education, opex, ROI, tco, UCS, Unified Fabric, vxi

This week our team is out in force at Oracle Open World in San Francisco, and with good reason.  Last week Scott Ciccone and I talked about the kinds of applications that are particularly well-served (no pun intended) by the new UCS B230 blade. Yesterday, Oracle quantified what that means when they announced world-record results with the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark, using a pair of B230s running Oracle WebLogic Server 11g, with our 4-socket B440 M1 acting as the database server.

I asked my colleague Girish Kulkarni, who works closely with our application partners, to help put this into context:

“We got the top dual-node SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark result of 11,283.80 JOPS@ Standard (jAppServer operations per second). This result surpasses the prior dual-node world record by 54 percent and was obtained running Oracle WebLogic Server 11g, Oracle Database 11g Release 2, and Oracle Enterprise Linux.”

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Tags: app server, B200, B230, B440, benchmark, Intel Xeon, Oracle, Oracle E-Business Suite, UCS, unified computing, unified computing system, WebLogic