On the official Egenera Blog there is a new post by Ken Oestreich comparing the Cisco UCS to the Egenera PAN solution that is available on both their own hardware as well as being OEM software in the Dell PAN System. He makes some interesting comparisons from both functionality, price, and matured product perspective.
Here is a quote from the article…
Lots of buzz in the air about Cisco entering the server market with the Unified Computing System – using the words “Revolutionary”, “Breakthrough”, etc. Now, to have Cisco enter the server market is certainly revolutionary… but neither their technology nor their business value is particularly new. But their marketing sure turned-up the volume on it all.
Cisco has sat by the sidelines for a number of years, and watched Egenera in particular — as well as IBM, HP and even a few smaller players – enter the market with ‘converged’ networking and repurposeable servers. As long as 7 years ago, Egenera was selling our BladeFrame, which is essentially what UCS is. Stateless x86 servers, converged network backplane. Low component counts, low complexity. Extraordinarily low TCO compared with traditional servers, I/O and networking.
There are some really good points here on the overall technology that is finally breaking through.
I encourage you to read the full article .
Once you have read it I would like to get your take on what is discussed. What are your thoughts on Cisco UCS, PAN, HP Matrix, etc? Do you see the benefits?
What my problem is from what I have seen with the UCS is the fact that it is all 1.0 version software. Like VMware it would take us a while before we would consider running it in production. It is an impressive idea, but not original. As a matter of fact it offers only a few technical advantages while only doing about 70% of what PAN can do. If I had not seen PAN before I would probably been far more impressed.
We took a look at PAN when it was on Egenera hardware only and we really liked it. Out only problem was our budget tanked about the same time. We are actually looking at the Dell PAN now again.
Cisco may be a good solution, but production? Not this year!
I think Egenera’s biggest mistake was keeping with the messaging that “we were first, blah, blah, blah” and having such a big ego that they did not realize that they could not rest on that for ever. Here comes UCS that I will admit is not as feature rich yet, but has some technology advantages (10GB ethernet) and it seems like Egenera is sitting on the asses no doing a thing to keep up.
I personally love the PAN solution and had worked with it at a prior job and at this time would still choose it over Cisco, because as mentioned, version 1.x anything is not acceptable to me. However if Egenera does not watch it they will be out of business within a year. Dell and their lack of enterprise knowledge will not save Egenera. Dell has about as much experience in mission critical datacenters as a Yugo does in the Daytona 500.