HP Claims Victory In Virtualisation Standards

“Cisco has a proprietary packet format, that modifies the Ethernet frame to integrate UCS servers with switches,” said Congdon. “That was more intrusive than the Industry wanted to see. Modifying the frame is usually a bad thing, because it can make everyone’s silicon obsolete, and customers have to buy new equipment, to address an incremental problem. If we can avoid that, it is a good thing.”

Hardware NICs effectively now include an Ethernet switch, and Congdon wants to see a “small evolutionary step” that exposes the network traffic to the outside world. Cisco wanted a new tag format, new addresses, and new hardware structures, he said.

The end result wasn’t a battle to the death (unlike all too many IEEE standards spats) says Congdon: “Cisco and HP started out at odds with each other, but finally came to a compromise.”

That compromise is for VEPA to form a base standard, while Cisco addresses extensions that it thinks are necessary.

Base standard – with optional Cisco extensions

Customers should be able to build virtualised data centres, with a greater choice of vendors by sticking to VEPA, but have the option to buy more restrictive equipment using the Cisco ideas, said Congdon.

“At the end of the day, there will be two standards. One is primarily promoted by HP as foundational, and the Cisco one that extends that for their specific needs,” he sums up. The Cisco extension, in a nutshell, adds a tag to replicate multicast traffic, something that Congdon says there is no real need to do:

“The base standard is sufficient to meet customer needs. It will bring costs down and give people more choice. There is nothing that requires a proprietary solution here.”

The compromise has been possible because it’s happened before the IEEE formally started the process: the group has yet to issue the all important PAR, which formally launches a standards project. “802.1 operates differently from other IEEE groups – we don’t start a project without a clear idea of what the answer is,” says Congdon. “We won’t start a PAR that is a problem statement.”

And now the fight moves to the markets

Cisco has promised to comply with the base standard – though from experience, eWEEK would suggest keeping a check on the vendor’s time-scales. “Today, UCS is closely coupled to all Cisco infrastructure,” said Congdon. “With this standard, it’s conceivable that Cisco could open up UCS to a wider solution space – we’ll see how rapidly that occurs.”

The battle has a great significance for HP. As a leading blade server provider and, in many sectors, the second network switch vendor to Cisco, it stood to gain a lot from the overlap between the two areas – or else to lose massively, if Cisco’s UCS seized the territory.

The development of VEPA should help users who cling to Cisco for safety, to trust non-UCS converged data centres – and HP has recently reversed moves for its Procurve network division to become more independent – making it part of the company’s technology solutions group (TSG) alongside servers.

“HP is the dominant blade server provider, I don’t believe we’ve seen any change in that. And in these economic times, people are more reluctant to embrace some proprietary or closed architecture. HP switches have made their biggest gains on Cisco, in 10G [Ten Gigabit Ethernet] – and most of that is attributable to the data centre space.”