UCS vs. HP BladeSystem: HP funded Tolly Report

I have had a few readers ask me to comment on a new report from Tolly that was commissioned by HP to compare the network bandwidth scalability between Cisco UCS and the HP BladeSystem c7000.  I have not read the report yet, however, on the Blades Made Simple blog (link listed below), there is a brief explanation of the report findings, link to the full report and then some great comments (you have to check them out).

http://bladesmadesimple.com/2010/02/tolly-report-hp-flex-10-vs-cisco-ucs-network-bandwidth-scalability-comparison/

I encourage you to take a look at the comments, they get pretty detailed about the UCS architecture, comparisons to the HP structure, etc.  I found the comments from Sean McGee (Cisco data center architect and former a network architect for the HP BladeSystem BU) and then feedback from Ken Henault (HP Infrastructure Architect) a lot of fun to read.  You can tell both of these guys are passionate about the technology.  Hey, I can’t blame them, this stuff rocks.  (I do find it interesting there are a lot of folks at Cisco formerly with the HP BladeSystem group).

My two cents (before reading the actual report, mind you):

As a UCS user, I am not too concerned with the over subscription possibility.  In our current production environment we have not seen any issue with bandwidth.  We currently are using 16 blades over 2 chassis and within a few weeks we should start using our 3rd chassis and 8 more servers.  I will be mindful to watch our bandwidth usage and see if there is any real world problems.  I suspect at 24 servers I will not see any issues.

If you want to check out the report, here is the link:

http://www.tolly.com/Docdetail.aspx?Docnumber=210109