Cisco FEX for HP Bladesystem!

[ex-engineer1968]

I just found out that HP actually offers a Cisco FEX! This is amazing! Has HP surrendered to Cisco?? For any Cisco shop, they will NO DOUBT go with a Cisco FEX and forget all about VC, Flex-10, Flex Fabric, etc. The FEX is easy to deploy, there's no management and it's a perfect integration into Nexus. BUT IT LEAVES ALL OF HP's BLADE NETWORKING PRODUCTS IN THE COLD!!

Why did HP committ such business suicide for their blade networking solutions???

[MBSNL]

This is not the entire story.

While they support and have a Cisco FEX, the Cisco Adapter FEX is not available. And I doubt they ever will.

Yes, a HP BladeServer NIC with 802.1BR compatibility would kill Virtual Connect for everyone that has a Cisco Nexus network.

Because of this we are actually looking into Cisco UCS Blades now, this is solving the problem HP is not willing to solve for us.

[Casper42]

HP is not willing to solve is a bunch of BS.
HP is and always has been wide open to 3rd Party Integration. The FEX module proves that.
If you want to complain about the VIC not being available in the c7000, go talk to Cisco.

I personally saw a presentation of EMC and Cisco very early on before UCS where they annoucned the Nexus 4000 for HP BladeSystem (and Dell and IBM too)
Where did that product go? Oh thats right, Cisco killed it (except for IBM where they had a contractual obligation) and started pushing the inferior UCS instead.

Yeah B22FEX is awesome. You want to send a packet from Blade 1 to Blade 2, it gets to go all the way up to the Nexus 5000, possibly even higher depending on the config and teaming, and then all the way back down.
Oh thats slow and eats bandwidth? We can fix that, just buy more Nexus Ports!

If you think Cisco got into the Blade Server business for any reason other than to sell more Nexus ports, you are sadly mistaken. Go ask the financial analysts about something called MARGIN and compare Switches and Blade Servers and get back to me on why you spend the money you made to force your way into a low margin industry with several big players already in it.

Meanwhile forward thinkers such as yourself I'm sure will also be considering HP Networking for your DC Core Switches in the future right? Or even Juniper or Brocade? How come this is never a two way street?

[Casper42]

PS: The FEX is a pile. You get none of the features or Virtual Connect and almost none of the features of UCS. Why bother?

[xk2600]

You're an idiot. Obviously you know nothing about networking. Your entire datacenter would have to reside on the same VLAN in order to keep the traffic within the blade center. Only in heavy distributed computing shops would this provide any benefit, and people who do serious compute do it on RISC hardware NOT HP.

In a realistic forwarding path the greater majority of your traffic is going to have to traverse up to the distribution/core router to be routed onto the other VLAN where security is going to require you to pass in order to go through the proper firewalls and other measures to speak to the headend servers or backend SQL/ORACLE servers.

Should B22 + VIC ever be a reality in an HP c7000, the supportability garnished from the capability to have fabric path/VPC+ all the way into the VM and the removal of the throughput limitations of the Hypervisor's vSwitch will far outweigh the possibility you might save a nanosecond of latency jumping out of the box onto the fabric and back into the chassis. Keep in mind that the B22 provides a 1:1 relationship between the backplane's capacity and the actual internals of the c7000 (no oversubscription) so you're argument that it consumes bandwidth leaving and entering the chassis is rendered moot.

You server guys want it all. You have this silly ambition to hold onto the networking piece inside of your hardware. Stick with what you're good at... replacing hard drives and imaging boxes. Let the network alone. If anything HP's need to attempt to continue to compete in the network space is what has prevented the VIC from entering the c7k far more than Cisco's want or need to create the mezzanine card for HP.