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

[Nick Matthews]

I'm not sure if I fully understand the numbers behind this.  This is
kind of a pricing specific look, not very techy.

If you're going to deploy less than 1000 users, a C200 is the obvious
choice.  These are about the price of a single 7825, so it would be
perfect for your situation.

If you're looking at more than 1000, you're looking at MCS or C-series.

If we assume 7835 it's something like 18k, 7845, 24k.  A C-series is
26k+3k Vmware licensing= 29k.  Many of the companies I've encountered
have an ELA so they are already paying for the 3k, and it's 26k.

If you're on 7835's, it would look like: 3x 18k = 56k.  The services
on these are about 3x the price of a single UCS blade, so you're
probably looking at least another 5k a year on services.  3 years,
71k.

If you're on 7845's, the math is more obvious.  3x 24k = 72k.
Probably looking at 7k a year in services, so 91k over 3 years.

7825's, it would be something like 3x 12k = 36k.  Services maybe 3k a
year, total of 45k.

C210 would be 2 times 29k, 58k.  Service will be more like 2k a year,
so total 64k.

7825's are normally used in the 1000-2000 user range.  From the math
I've looked at, that's really the only time it makes financial sense
to go physical.  Plus, this is also assuming a non-redundant voicemail
and no contact center or presence plans, as any of those 3 would push
it towards virtualized.

Other notes: On the C200/C210/B200 you would be able to have redundant
voicemail for no additional hardware cost.  You could also use the
spare processing power to run a lab, which many cannot justify
otherwise.  I think it would be logical to assume that in a few years
Cisco will get away from the physical architecture and future
platforms would be virtualized only.  In that case, it will cost more
to move to virtualized in both experience and hardware costs at some
point.  As well, for these calculations I took pretty rough
estimations and also assumed 4 hour support with US prices.  I don't
know what they would look like in Europe.

Hope this helps a bit, even if it doesn't answer your direct question.

-nick


On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Zenon Mousmoulas <zmousm at admin.grnet.gr> wrote:
> 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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