Evaluating IaaS Solutions: Comparing UCS Director to HPE OneView

According to the latest predictions from analyst firm IDC, “more than 80% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud by 2017.” That means that your organization is likely to evaluate an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions this year, if you haven’t chosen one already. As you consider options, it can be difficult to evaluate the different management platforms and sort through the vendor claims. A team of technical experts developed a list of evaluation criteria to make it easier. They have recently published a white paper that provides a clear comparison between Cisco UCS Director and HPE OneView.  The paper looks at three critical areas of IaaS functionality:

Orchestration and automation

Self-service provisioning

Heterogeneous provisioning and management

A concise side-by-side comparison is provided in a table on page 5 of the document with details provided in the other sections of the paper.

You can download the paper here.

Just the Facts

The Gartner IT Glossary describes Infrastructure as a Service as follows:

“…a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities are owned and hosted by a service provider and offered to customers on-demand. Customers are able to self-provision this infrastructure, using a Web-based graphical user interface that serves as an IT operations management console for the overall environment. API access to the infrastructure may also be offered as an option.”

Using the Gartner definition, the IT organization owns and hosts the infrastructure, and it becomes the service provider. The goal of the white paper is to assess the extent to which Cisco UCS Director and HPE OneView address the requirements of an IaaS solution. The analysis is based on public information describing the latest versions of HPE OneView, version 2.0, and Cisco UCS Director, version 5.4.

Let me begin by saying that HPE OneView is an excellent converged infrastructure management tool for deploying and configuring many HPE products. The latest release includes some significant enhancements. However, as HPE states on the OneView web page and in their content, it only provides a “…path to Infrastructure-as-a-Service”. This becomes evident when you begin to assess the orchestration, self-service provisioning and API functionality in OneView as summarized in Table 1.

Table 1: Comparing Orchestration, Automation, Self-Service and API Capabilities

How Wide Is the Path to IaaS?

Most IT organizations plan to deliver a significant portion of their infrastructure as a service to end-users. They want a broad path to IaaS that gives them the capability to provision and manage the infrastructure, regardless of the hardware vendor. UCS Director provides IaaS support for a wide range of Cisco and third party hardware. HPE OneView is focused on providing management for only a portion of the HPE product portfolio. Table 2 below provides a summary of heterogeneous provisioning and management provided by UCS Director and HPE OneView.

Table 2: Heterogeneous Provisioning and Management by Infrastructure Type

UCS Director supports a diverse set of vendors across infrastructure types. Cisco has established partnerships and participated in joint development activities with many vendors over the past six years to develop this broad IaaS capability. Tasks and workflows automate the configuration of all hardware infrastructure layers including computing, networking, and storage. You can provision bare-metal servers, add virtualization layers, and add your chosen operating system(s). Support includes configuring virtual and object-based storage configurations as well.

HPE OneView Is Not OpenView

You should not confuse HPE OneView with HP OpenView, the monitoring product HPE acquired several years ago. OpenView was designed to be open, as the name implies. It supports HPE as well as a variety of third party servers and network devices. HPE OneView is focused on managing a limited environment of HPE hardware. It only provides support for a portion of HPE’s server, storage and converged infrastructure portfolio. The only third party products managed by OneView are Brocade and Cisco switches.

As your organization evaluates IaaS management solutions on your journey to hybrid cloud, I encourage you to consider the advantages of UCS Director. It was designed to deliver IaaS across infrastructure types from Cisco and a variety of hardware vendors, including HPE. UCS Director delivers IaaS out-of-the box, and it provides a strong platform and broad ecosystem that your organization can build on as you offer hybrid cloud services to your end users.

Download the paper to learn more about UCS Director and HPE OneView.

Ken

* See the HPE OneView 2.0 Support Matrix for details.