The latest bit of undeserved and ill-advised mud slinging thrown at UCS by HP, in the form of a classic bit of “franken-testing” by Tolly Group, makes me wonder if the marketing inmates have taken over the HP asylum and forgotten about their loyal partners, customers and bloggers out there.

To quote one HP customer, technical expert and well respected blogger, Andrew Sharrock in his blog post The infamous Tolly Bladegate Report:

If you haven’t guessed it yet, as an HP customer, I find this report disappointing and bordering on insulting. It is based on the fact that all traffic occurs inside a single chassis and that active/active is the devils work. Can anyone point me to an Architect who has designed a production solution to run inside a single chassis please? No? Oh.

Customers find FUD-slinging useless; Partners are bemused by it; Online bloggers and analysts don’t respect it: So why do it?

Isn’t it normal for the market leaders like HP to ignore and dismiss tiny players like UCS?  Our install base versus theirs is a tiny percentage: what have they got to be frightened of?  Yes, Cisco is a bigger company than HP on market capitalization, but not all of Cisco is working on UCS.

We are a small, but dedicated, team of people who believe – just like VMware always has done – that IT can be done a different, better way in the data center and that history shows vendors cannot “evolve from legacy” (shown by the lack of innovation from incumbents like HP over the years who’ve been happily taking the cash and driving up server sprawl and who’s business depended on under-utilization).

The Cisco UCS, MDS and Nexus line, unbound by legacy and through unequalled collaboration with VMware, have weaved together industry standards and innovation to produce a new type of car that, while having familiar doors, wheels and controls, drives like nothing else out there.  The UCS whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

There are fundamental technical differences between Cisco and HP compute platforms, such as the “centralized” vs. “edge” networking approach, but in my humble experience the customer decides what’s best not through religion nor on who shouts the loudest (or pays money to hired mud slingers like Tolly).  The Tolly report and HP did nothing to help customers understand this.

A fundamental operational difference between Cisco and HP is UCS aims to reduce components and control planes so you can scale up and down freely.  A HP C7000 is a mini rack with both ethernet and fibre-channel switching included – great, if you only have one or two of them, but horrible if you have any more.  Making inter-server, untrusted (yes, that’s right!  Just because blade A sits in the same chassis as blade B does not mean they trust each other, especially in a multi-tenanted cloud environment) traffic traverse through a centrally managed, high performance and secure switching fabric has been standard practice for years until vSwitches and mini-racks came along and brought network-sprawl while curing server-sprawl.  The Tolly report and HP did nothing to help customers understand this.

A fundamental business difference between Cisco and partners’ “best of breed” vs. HP “Jack of all trades, master of none”.  Take the systems management of the data center: at Cisco we believe customers have already made huge investments in these best of breed systems and we want to integrate into those.  HP, once they’ve sold you the compute purely to form a beach head in your organisation, will ask you to rip and replace your systems management out and reinvest in their mediocre “we do everything” proprietary stack at a huge cost of change.  The cumulative cost of all that extra software and consulting will massively, and I mean MASSIVELY, dwarf your investment in compute.  The Tolly report and HP did nothing to help customers understand this.

Back to the customer and that report: “What compute shall I use?”, is just one of many decision points for customers to worry about and it’s our job to help them decide what’s best for a strategic platform and solutions to their real problems, not just a point piece, by giving them as much credible information so they can make the best informed choice.

The kind of information that HP should spend their money on, instead of paying Kevin Tolly’s crew to play make-believe in the lab, is:

1. What’s the business case? Not just TCO, power, disk size, throughput (YAWN), but what’s my return on investment, but what time?  I’m the CIO: tell me what I can really do with this.
2. What’s the use case? How does your solution solve my unique problem?  Buying another “bunch of blades” only adds to my problems.  What you gonna do about that?
3. How do I evaluate your platform against my requirements? Don’t give me the “franken-lab” biased and fixed outcomes, give me a plan on how my guys can test it, either in your labs or on my site.  If your product does what it says then you have nothing to fear, right?  I want to know how your solution fixes my problems, not how you perform in a trivial and unrealistic use case against a competitor.
4. What will the end state look like? Will I have less OpEx?  What will my teams look like?  Will I need less tools?  Will I be offering a flexible service to my developers?  How many data centers fewer?
5. How well do you play with my current partner ecosystem? I have made a significant investment in my enterprise systems management, so how does your platform integrate?  I use <X> systems integrator, can you work with them?

And you know what?  If after going through a well-planned and executed evaluation process the customer decides not to use UCS then it’s probably the right reason for them so let’s all move on, no hard feelings, good luck Mr Customer and see you at the bar at VMworld Copenhagen: we can chat then on your experiences and see how things went.  I’ll bring my bag of “I told you so!”‘s with me… Just kidding!  (or am I?)

My experience of having been through the above five-step process with customers is that UCS makes good business, operational and technical sense for solving some key strategic and tactical issues and I’m so glad that my employer supports me in focusing time on customers instead of wasting money on Kevin Tolly and his merry band of mud-slingers

Apart from mud-slinging, another HP trick is to come along at the 11th hour with a massively deeply discounted “we’ll do whatever it takes” to try and undermine a sound business deal.  Whilst some customers will be tempted by it, others will see it for the unsustainable beachhead business that it is and realise that HP will endeavour get their money back from you someway through their old, tried’n'trusted “nickle’n'diming” of additional software and consulting.  Worse than that, for the customer, is a missed opportunity that won’t happen again for a few years: new way of doing IT, or stuck in the past?  What’s the cost of that?

I’ll leave the last word to Andrew Sharrock, because his post matches what customers have told me since the report came out:

What this test isn’t showing me is the apparent operational benefits of HP’s Bladesystem. That’s what I want as a customer. My problems are not one of tech they are operational and this is seemingly what Cisco are aiming to help me with. Oh well HP, it was a nice headline and any PR is good PR apparently. However, this customer has learnt far more about UCS by investigating these claims and I likes it. I likes it a lot [sic].

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