[cisco-voip] customer-provided MCS-equivalent IBM servers, currently available in Europe?

[Zenon Mousmoulas]

Hi,

We are planning to upgrade our infrastructure, migrating from 1x CUCM 6.1 and 1x Unity 5.x to 2x (publisher-subscriber cluster) CUCM 8.x and 1x CUCN 8.x. In this context we are facing the need for new hardware to run the UC apps. Since the Cisco MCS hardware is rather expensive, relative to the overall budget of the project and also compared to the pricing of non-Cisco branded servers with matching specifications, we are considering the use of IBM servers.

We have been looking at the IBM server solutions for Cisco 7800 MCS[1] but we have realized that the models listed there are rather outdated and/or the given IBM part numbers are not available in Europe. To be more specific, the web page lists IBM part number 7947-PML as equivalent to Cisco MCS-7835-I3 but this part number is not available to order from IBM (anymore). A currently available IBM server with matching (or better) specs would rather be IBM System x3650 M3 with part number 7945K8G[2].

We have also considered virtualizing the UC apps, however a) entry-level UCS (we would need two for redundancy) is not attractive, for the same reasons, b) blade servers (both Cisco and third-party) are out of the question in this case due to rack space, power, A/C, networking etc. and most importantly budget restrictions, c) complying to "Specs-based VMware Support"[3] policy requires considerable over-engineering, which is not justified in the context of such a project, unless we were to build a full-fledged virtualization infrastructure for broader use. So it seems that going with a non-virtualized deployment makes more sense in our case.

Is there maybe a more current list of MCS-equivalent IBM systems? Does anyone have experience running UC apps on slightly different systems, are they supported by Cisco after all? Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Zenon Mousmoulas

[1] http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/voicesw/ps6790/ps5748/ps378/product_solution_overview0900aecd80091615.html
[2] http://www5.pc.ibm.com/europe/products.nsf/$wwwPartNumLookup/_7945K8G?OpenDocument&ExpandSection=1&sourcesite=IBM
[3] http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Specification-Based_Hardware_Support