Clabby Analytics: Counter-Opinion Report
Does Forrester’s First Blade Assessment Miss the Mark?

Executive Summary

Forrester Research, a highly respected, independent research organization that provides business and technology guidance, has just published its first Wave report on blade computing. This report, entitled “The Forrester Wave: Blade Server Systems, Q2 2009” articulates 44 blade computer buying criteria — and then provides rankings based upon Forrester’s assessments. And, in Forrester’s opinion, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was ranked the leader in blade servers.

Clabby Analytics has been critiquing blades since 2002 — and emphatically disagrees with Forrester’s assessment. We think Forrester missed the mark when it declared HP blades superior to IBMs in the areas of systems design, component portfolio, and strategy:

• In systems design, IBM blades and blade chassis are clearly superior in high availability and in density (IBM offers the densest blades in the industry). And, unlike HP, IBM offers five blade chassis designs, each one optimized for a typical customer usage scenario.
• In component portfolio (an evaluation of the breadth and depth of a given blade vendor’s product offerings), Clabby Analytics can easily argue that IBM’s portfolio is broader (we wonder if Forrester weighed the hundreds of products brought to IBM’s portfolio through the Blade.org ecosystem). We also contend that IBM’s blade management software is better than HP’s software — especially when it comes to managing Virtual I/O. And we have personally IBM’s x86 blades, storage blades, workstation blades, POWER-based blades, cell blades, plus field programmable gate array blades and other blades from IBM’s partner community — and, accordingly, also challenge HP’s “win” in this category.
• In strategy, we’re hard-pressed to understand how HP’s one-size-fits-all single chassis design constitutes a better strategy than IBM’s multiple, optimized blade designs. Clabby Analytics does not believe that a single blade chassis design like HP’s can best meet all blade computing needs across all markets and all industries. Clabby Analytics believes that special designs are warranted to address application, ruggedization, power, and space needs; dense, high-speed computing needs; standard/small office needs; and so on.

We also think that Forrester’s evaluation criteria should have focused more on elements that information technology executives value in the blade space such as choice, openness, and cost. If these factors had been weighed properly, IBM would have won in the choice category (IBM: 5 chassis; HP: 1); in the openness category (with its numerous, open switch choices as opposed to HP’s proprietary VirtualConnect switches); and in the cost category (given the huge cost differences incurred when deploying HP’s Virtual Connect). Should Forrester issue a follow-on Wave report at some future time, we would suggest that these buying criteria play a bigger role in Forrester’s assessment model.

The remainder of this report will explore in detail the key, specific areas Forrester's assessment misses the mark and offer Clabby Analytics’ counter-opinion.

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Readers should be advised that Clabby Analytics’ has published numerous opinions and advisories on blade computing and blade server vendors. These reports are available for free at www.ClabbyAnalytics.com.

Readers should also be advised that IBM is well-aware of our opinions, and asked us to review Forrester’s Wave report and then provide some of our perspectives on that report in a Clabby Analytics Counter-Opinion. The remainder of this report does just that.

Finally, it should be noted that Clabby Analytics Counter-Opinion reports are designed to present “the other side of the argument. Please read this report, and Forrester’s report, and decide for yourself which vendor’s blade solution best suits your needs.

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