Converged Compute Platforms

Recently I had an opportunity to visit Forsythe Technology Evaluation Center in Skokie, IL. A fabulous facility, a technologist's playground. Equipment from who's who of IT space, which Forsythe maintains and allows its clients to assess before making a decision. I belive the model is neat - companies evaluating technology options can come to the data center, present their test matrix to Forsythe, which configures the test lab, and runs the test. No waiting for the equipment to show up at your own lab, commissioning, configuration, and decommissioning. Think about cost of opportunity savings in reaching a quick decision. Forsythe can help companies with storage, servers, security, network, backup and recovery applications etc.

The piece de resistance in the lab for me was unified computing aisle, Cisco UCS and HP Blade Matrix racks, the lack of the cable fountainhead emanating from the enclosures was pleasantly discernible. Although I was limited in my time, so could not get to see comparison between UCS and HP Blade Matrix. These two platforms hold the secret to CTO's promise for delivering a scalable and elastic compute platform. What would help the most for IT decision makers like me though is to get a clear idea of cost comparisons between the platforms. In my experience it was quite difficult to get a clear picture from Cisco as to what would be the cost of implementation, Cisco's partnerships with EMC and NetApp also make it a bit confusing.

Regardless having a technology challenger like Cisco in the mix definitely has raised the bar for the blade vendors. Integration with VMWare and storage stack would be a big differentiator - both promise deep integration. Incumbent position of HP in server space has given it some leverage and raised the barriers to entry for Cisco for sometime, but I suspect not for long. These changes can be made during asset refresh cycles.

Architecture decisions regarding FC, NFS, iSCSI, or FCoE should also have a bearing on the UCS vs Matrix. What helps companies the most is creating all the assumptions, and finances on the table - define the end state and then map a clear roadmap. On the way show what investments would be made when, and what would be the criteria for the decisions. Management centricity of the ecosystem should not be ignored as well.