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

[Michael Balasko]

We rolled our own 7845's for our UCS and built 10 of them.

See here-


IBM-

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/voicesw/ps6790/ps5748/ps378/product_solution_overview0900aecd80091615.html



HP-


http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/voicesw/ps6790/ps5748/ps378/product_solution_overview09186a0080107d79.html

and here:

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/partners/cisco-server-solutions.html?jumpid=ex_r2858_us/en/large/tsg/go_cisco_serversolutions


Michael Balasko
CCSP,CCNP,MCSE,SCP
Network Specialist II
City of Henderson
240 Water St.
Henderson, Nv 89015
P:702-267-4337
C:702-373-2730

"The problem with TCP jokes is that people keep retelling them slower until you get them."


From: cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net [mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Ryan Ratliff
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2011 11:17 AM
To: Zenon Mousmoulas
Cc: Mike Norton; Cisco VoIPoE List
Subject: Re: [cisco-voip] customer-provided MCS-equivalent IBM servers, currently available in Europe?

This sentence of the doc referenced is interesting.  "These part numbers are not generally announced, and are only made available for purchase by customers of these Cisco solutions."  I wonder if they truly aren't available or perhaps whoever you were talking to just didn't know about them since they aren't generally available.

-Ryan

On Jun 21, 2011, at 1:08 PM, Norton, Mike wrote:

When I got mine a couple years ago, the system part number wasn't getting us anywhere with IBM, but somewhere there was a Cisco document listing the IBM part numbers of each individual component of the system and we were able to get it that way. It took several weeks longer to come than our regular IBM servers, and was pretty overpriced considering it was fairly out-of-date hardware, but still way cheaper than Cisco MCS.

--
Mike Norton
I.T. Support
Peace Wapiti School Division No. 76
Helpdesk: 780-831-3080
Direct: 780-831-3076


-----Original Message-----
From: cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net<mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net> [mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Zenon Mousmoulas
Sent: June-21-11 1:39 AM
To: cisco-voip at puck.nether.net<mailto:cisco-voip at puck.nether.net>
Subject: [cisco-voip] customer-provided MCS-equivalent IBM servers, currently available in Europe?

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

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