Comments on Cisco UCS
I've been reading a number of interesting commentaries on Cisco's launch of UCS and thought you might find them interesting. Having provided data for similar tools while at IDC, I'm convinced that these tools should be completely understood before their results are taken as gospel. It's critical that readers understand several things about these vendor-created tools including the following:
- Where did the underlying data come from? Is it neutral?
- Is it complete and accurate?
- Is the tool comparing apples and oranges or apples and apples?
- Is the supplier acting out of "benchmarkmanship" by including unnecessary hardware or software for the competitor to make their producta look better?
In the end, any tool provided by a supplier ought to be viewed carefully and not believed outright.
Dan Busby, VP of Engineering for eGenera, in a post titled,A closer look at Cisco pricing, pointed out that it appears that the Cisco's study was evaluating was an HP Bladesystem and that the cost calculator included some hype that would tend to confuse the uninformed.
Dave Robers, CEO of Vyatta, in a post titled, Selling your data center soul for 20 percent, also challenged some of the TCO claims made by Cisco.
When reviewing Cisco's TCO data, I can't help but be reminded of something attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." I'm sure he would have added benchmarks, ROI studies and TCO studies to the list had he known about them.