In reply to Bill Shields.

I think that's a really important point, Bill. The UCS power numbers in Figure 5 include power for switching between all 80 blades whereas the HP numbers only include local chassis switching.

Furthermore, there is the problem of having to power duplicate devices in each chassis. I thought this quote from the paper summed it up nicely: "The unified fabric power savings advantage becomes more apparent as the number of blade enclosures increases, because for every HP blade enclosure added to the system, duplicate onboard administrators and virtual connect switches are needed. As the number of blades increase, the power savings decisively favors the Cisco UCS blade solution."

It is interesting how the power savings follow the same trend as cost savings... UCS scales better.