Huawei previews Cisco-killin' E9000 modular system Chinese telecom giant and increasingly important server player Huawei Technologies is moving from racks and blades into modular designs that use a mix of both approaches – and look very much like modular kit from Cisco Systems, IBM, and Hitachi, as well as the newer bladish iron from HP and Dell. The likeness between the …
Given the lack of any sort of converged ethernet, and using an I/O design that is ~10 years old (buying more modules with each chassis), I am not sure this is exactly a Cisco killer. I would say this hits HP, IBM and Dell a lot harder. I would think Dell is most at risk because Huawei is sure to compete on pricing.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with "adding switch capacity with every enclosure" - since even with UCS, you need to add fabric modules to each new chassis. And you need to plan for resiliency there, too just as much as you would with a bog standard switch.
And looking at the Cisco modules, depending on your point of view, they're either switches themselves (just switching something other than plain Ethernet) or they're dumb devices for aggregation of bandwidth. One view has them adding switch capacity with every chassis, the other says they're a reasonably dumb and inefficient piece of circuitry for which Cisco charges as much as a small car.
"Blade enclosures ran hot because they were the wrong shape, and the fact that by simply reorienting the parts you can get the machines to have the same computing capacity in the same form factor just goes to show you that the world still need engineers."
Seriously?? Where did you take that from? Huawei marketing materials? Every Intel chip draws X Watts & you can deliver n*X Watts of power / cooling to a cabinet. In all modern blade designs (including Cisco & HP) this is a limiting factor for cabinet density, not how cleverly you bend the metal parts ;)
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