Cisco UCS vs. HP BladeSystem Power Efficiency Comparison

Cisco’s server power engineering team recently compared the Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis with B200 M3 blade servers against HP’s BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure and HP ProLiant BL460c Gen8 blade servers.

The results weren’t surprising internally, but they might surprise you. The main findings were:

Efficiency

The Cisco UCS 5108 enclosure configured with Cisco UCS B200 M3 blades achieved a 6.3% higher performance-to-power ratio than the HP BladeSystem c7000 with HP ProLiant BL460c blades, using with similarly configured hardware, BIOS, and OS settings.

At a 70% target load, the Cisco UCS blade solution consumed 6.5% less power than the HP ProLiant blade solution.

Power

At the maximum target load, the Cisco UCS blade solution consumed 192 watts (W), or 7.2% less power, than the equivalently configured HP BladeSystem solution.

The Cisco UCS blade solution consumed 167 watts, or 17.4% less power, while idle than the equivalently configured HP BladeSystem solution: a difference equivalent to the power consumed by three idle HP ProLiant BL460c Gen8 blades.

Including the power consumed by a pair of redundant Fabric Interconnects, the Cisco UCS blade solution consumes less power than an equivalent HP BladeSystem solution.

The complete results are posted on Cisoc.com (link to download the entire white paper [updated to 2014 version of the whitepaper]) so that you can replicate the results independently.

What are our customers saying about their power and cooling savings? See my previous blog post “Cisco UCS Servers – Watts driving your power and cooling costs?”

How much could you save by switching to UCS?

Would you like to learn more about how Cisco UCS can help you? There are more than 250 published datacenter case studies on Cisco.com. Additionally, there is a TCO/ROI tool that will allow you to compare your existing environment to a new UCS Solution. For a more in-depth TCO/ROI analysis, contact your Cisco partner.