Complexity and Cost Comparison: Cisco UCS vs. IBM Flex Systemis report recently published by Principled Technologies.

They evaluated both the technologies and costs of each solution and found a UCS solution is both less expensive to deploy and less complex to manage than an IBM Flex System.

Off all the ways Principled Technologies shows how UCS is a superior solution, I wanted to touch on just one: highly available and scalable management. A UCS management domain consists of a pair of Fabric Interconnects and supports up to 160 bladeand/orrack servers. In contrast, IBM is limited to 54 blade servers plus anon-redundantFlex System Manager node. Quotingfromthe paper:

Because IBM Flex System Manager nodes do not failover automatically like the Cisco UCS solution, administrators must manually connect to a backup node and bring it online. Each target system has an OS agent that remains registered to the original FSM node and does not recognize the new FSM. Admins must manually unregister each of these agents from the failed node and then register the new FSM node. [page 7]

Read the full report to learn the many additional ways which UCS is shown to be superior solution and why Cisco has leapt ahead of IBM and is now the#2 blade server vendor worldwide¹

Would like to learn more about how Cisco is changing the economics of the datacenter, I would encourage you to review this presentation on SlideShare  or my previous series of blog posts,Yes, Cisco UCS servers are that good.

1. Source:  IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, Q1 2013 Revenue Share, May 2013